Since the last rapid risk assessment on this multi-country hepatitis A outbreak, 19 EU/EEA countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom-England & Wales) have reported 1 363 new outbreak-confirmed cases. Outbreak-confirmed cases are EU/EEA residents with laboratory-confirmed hepatitis A virus (HAV) genotype IA and a sequence with 99.3% homology to one of the three HAV genotype IA outbreak strains (VRD_521_2016; RIVM-HAV16-090; and V16-25801) based on overlapping fragments at the VP1-2a region.
In July 2012, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control initiated a Europe-wide investigation on a Salmonella Stanley outbreak, together with the affected Member States, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Reference Laboratory for Salmonella (EURL Salmonella).
The sixth European Scientific Conference on Applied Infectious Disease Epidemiology (ESCAIDE) opened today at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC).
The Public Health Authorities of Catalonia, Spain, have notified a community acquired outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in Blanes. Blanes is a coastal town in the province of Girona.
On 25 and 26 of July, two additional cases of soft-tissue anthrax among injecting drug users have been reported from the United Kingdom and Denmark. The genetic typing of the strains related to these cases is ongoing.
From April to early July 2012 an unusual number and pattern of fatalities among young children were reported by Kantha Bopa Children’s Hospital in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh. The patients presented with fever, respiratory distress and signs of encephalitis, and most of the children were under 3 years old.