Joint Meeting of the ECDC’s Food- and Waterborne Diseases and Zoonoses Network and of the EFSA’s Zoonoses Monitoring Data Network
The third Joint Meeting of the ECDC’s Food- and Waterborne Disease and Zoonoses Network and of the EFSA’s Zoonoses Monitoring Data Network was organised around the theme "One health approach to collaborative response to foodborne disease outbreaks in EU/EEA".
During the two days, public health and food safety/veterinary authorities had several opportunities for networking and learning from each other on best practices and tools used at country and EU level for the investigation of and response to multi-country foodborne outbreaks.
The topics discussed included examples of recent multi-country outbreaks in the EU: an event of Salmonella Enteritidis linked to contaminated eggs originating from Poland and an outbreak caused by a new, previously unknown Salmonella serotype and linked to imported contaminated sesame seeds. The countries involved, ECDC and EFSA, as well as the European Commission gave an overview of their contribution to the investigation and the management of these outbreaks.
Several EU-wide projects and tools were presented, including ENGAGE, Swiss One Health project, EuroCigua project, the Early Warning and Response System (EWRS) platform and Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF).
The meeting was also an opportunity to identify and prioritise the gaps in the collaborative efforts to better responding to foodborne outbreaks at the national and EU level.