This expert opinion is intended to support national decision-making by summarising the considerations and concerns of some EU/EEA countries when they discussed whether to introduce the 4CMenB vaccine into their national immunisation programmes.
In May 2012 a collection of five strains of Haemophilus spp was sent to 28 participating reference laboratories in the IBD-labnet surveillance network for quality assurance testing. The laboratories were asked to characterise the five strains by performing standard laboratory protocols for the methods usually used by the laboratory for: species identification, biotyping and serotyping by serological methods and/or PCR.
The results of this EQA are published in the this report.