A delegation from the European Parliament's Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) will be visiting ECDC on 1-2 September.
This paper and review from a Singapore-based group compared results obtained for estimating rates of new infections during the 2009 pandemic. They derived rates from paired specimens from the same patient (serum cohort approach), cross-sectional serological surveys, rates of unconfirmed syndromic influenza-like-illness (ILI) obtained from primary care physicians in sentinel general practices, and combined clinical repos with laboratory confirmed samples.
This collection of article is intended to clarify the issues that arose, during the 2009 pandemic around definitions of the pandemic term, both in a theoretical and practical way.
A multinational European team has reported the isolation of a human monoclonal antibody that can seemingly bind to and neutralize representative of all the known sub-types classes of influenza A haemagglutinins (HAs). This is the first such report of such an antibody.
A group of international experts came together by a joint initiative by ECDC and CDC, to create a standardised international terminology to describe and classify resistant bacteria.
The European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC), issued a report about the ECDC/JRC collaboration on the improvement of MedISys, a web-based tool for epidemic intelligence activities.
EMA recommends restricting use in persons under 20 years of age Pandemrix to be used only in the absence of seasonal trivalent influenza vaccines, following link to very rare cases of narcolepsy in young people. Overall benefit-risk remains positive.
On 21 July 2011 the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) issued its opinion on the review of Pandemrix® and reports on narcolepsy. The CHMP recommended that in persons under 20 years of age Pandemrix® may only be used if the recommended seasonal trivalent influenza vaccine is not available and if immunisation against H1N1 is still needed (e.g. in persons at risk of the complications of infection).
The European Food Standard Agency has recently published a call for proposals for a methodological framework for potentially pandemic influenza strains.