Recent ECDC data show that despite progress in prevention and control efforts, the hepatitis B and hepatitis C viruses (HBV and HCV) continue to pose significant public health challenges in the European Union and European Economic Area (EU/EEA).
ECDC provides support to EU/EEA countries in monitoring their progress towards the hepatitis elimination targets and has just published a report based on the second data collection.
Approximately four in five people living with hepatitis B and three out of four people with hepatitis C infection across the European Union and European Economic Area (EU/EEA) and the UK have not yet been diagnosed. This is a major obstacle on the way towards the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) for health in 2030 as highlighted by ECDC on occasion of World Hepatitis Day.
The first report monitoring the progress towards the elimination of hepatitis B and C across European Union (EU) and European Economic Area (EEA) countries has been published by ECDC.
The goal for 2030: a world free of hepatitis. Currently, Europe records around 57 000 newly diagnosed acute and chronic cases of hepatitis B and C each year.
A recent article by Watanabe et al. in the Cell Host & Microbe journal describes an attempt to assess the risk of emergence of pandemic influenza viruses closely related to the 1918 influenza virus.
The final report of the FLURISK project by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) proposes a risk assessment framework to rank animal influenza strains according to their potential to infect humans.