The sixth European Scientific Conference on Applied Infectious Disease Epidemiology (ESCAIDE) opened today at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC).
While many European countries are progressing towards TB elimination, the target of less than 1 TB case/ 1,000,000 population is still far from being achieved everywhere. This was one of the messages presented today by ECDC Director Marc Sprenger during the joint session with WHO "Towards elimination of tuberculosis" at the European Respiratory Society annual congress.
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.
Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) or carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae (CPE) are highly resistant to antibiotics, leaving only a few options for treatment of infected patients, and thus represent a serious threat to public health.
The annual meeting of the healthcare-associated infections surveillance network (HAI-Net) and of the HAI-Net coordination group took place in Stockholm on 19-21 June 2012.
The focus of the 2012 TB surveillance network meeting was the performance indicators of TB programmes and on enhancement and harmonisation of treatment outcome monitoring (TOM) of MDR-TB.
WHO “SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands” is an annual campaign that makes part of major global effort to support healthcare workers to improve hand hygiene practices in healthcare settings, and thus support the prevention of often life-threatening healthcare-associated infections.
ECDC and the European Respiratory Society (ERS) have developed 21 patient-centred standards that aim to guide clinicians and public health workers in their daily work to ensure optimal diagnosis, treatment and prevention of tuberculosis (TB) in Europe. Nearly 74 000 reported TB cases in the EU/EEA in 2010 clearly show that tuberculosis remains a public health challenge across the region.