Vaccination helps to prevent diseases and, above all, saves lives. This was the message at an expert meeting on childhood immunisation organised by the Hungarian Presidency. ECDC Director Marc Sprenger stressed the importance of successful vaccination programmes across Europe and future challenges.
Each year in February WHO convenes a meeting with advisers from the WHO Influenza Collaborating Centres and Essential Reference laboratories in order to achieve consensus and advise WHO on the optimal formulation of seasonal influenza vaccines for the next influenza season.
The journal Critical Care Medicine has recently published a supplement of open access articles on the experience in intensive care units during the 2009 pandemic of influenza.
The first study, conducted in Europe during the 2009 pandemic addressed several objectives concerning the pathogenesis of the disease caused by the influenza A(H1N1) 2009 viruses.
While there have been some early descriptive reports of school outbreaks, for example a number published in Eurosurveillance from France and the UK this study is unusual in combining modelling, social network theory and ‘shoe-leather epidemiology’.
This initiative was taken following the indication of a potential association between the 2009 pandemic influenza A(H1N1) monvalent vaccine and the occurrence of narcolepsy following reports, especially in children from Finland and Sweden.
This study is part of a survey that uses rats and their fleas as indicators of the presence of zoonotic agents in Cyprus. During the three-year survey (2001–2003), fleas were collected from 622 wild rats captured at 51 localities in all five prefectures of Cyprus.