Urgent action is required to improve efforts to prevent hepatitis B and C infections in the EU/EEA and the UK if the region is to meet the 2020 targets for the elimination of viral hepatitis as a serious threat to public health. Significant gaps in the reported data in relation to prevalence and prevention of HBV and HCV in EU/EEA and the UK present a major challenge to monitoring progress towards the targets for elimination of hepatitis.
This report presents the results of the fourth round of the EQA on antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) for national public health laboratories for Campylobacter (Campylobacter EQA4-AST) within the Food‐ and Waterborne Diseases and Zoonoses Network (FWD-Net). The objectives of this EQA4-AST were to determine the accuracy of quantitative AST results reported by participants; to identify common laboratory problems related to the guidance in the EU protocol, and to assess the overall comparability of routinely collected AST data from national public health reference laboratories across Europe.
This report provides an analysis of the external quality assessment (EQA) for the antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) performance of laboratories participating in the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network (EARS-Net) in 2019. A total of 952 laboratories (1–95 per country) from 30 EU/EEA countries participated in the EQA exercise.
ECDC coordinates the enhanced surveillance for hepatitis A, B and C to help countries define epidemiological trends or transmission patterns among newly diagnosed cases.
World Hepatitis Day on 28 July provides an opportunity each year to increase the awareness and understanding of viral hepatitis.
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.
In 2018, 37 527 cases of hepatitis C were reported in 29 EU/EEA Member States. The number is 37 427 when countries that only reported acute cases are excluded, which corresponds to a crude rate of 8.8 cases per 100 000 population.
This report provides the first collation of data relating to the monitoring of the progress towards the elimination of hepatitis B and C for EU/EEA countries.