The OECD report ‘Health at a Glance: Europe 2018’ summarises the EULabCap indicator results in the chapter on public health laboratory capacity to control infectious disease threats.
Since the latest ECDC-EFSA rapid outbreak assessment published on 12 December 2017, 15 EU/EEA countries (Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden and United Kingdom) have reported 336 confirmed, 94 probable and 3 new historical-confirmed cases associated with this ongoing multi-country outbreak of Salmonella Enteritidis in the EU/EEA.
This report provides an analysis of the external quality assessment (EQA) performance of laboratories participating in the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network (EARS-Net) in 2017.
This rapid risk assessment addresses the public health risk associated with a previously unrecognised international spread of near pandrug-resistant strains of S. epidermidis as a cause of infection in several countries including EU Member States.
This report presents the results of the eighth round of the external quality assessment (EQA-8) scheme for typing of Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica organised for public health national reference laboratories (PH NRLs) in ECDC’s Food- and Waterborne Diseases and Zoonoses network (FWD-Net).
The results of the third pan-EU/EEA survey presented in this report showed that by mid-2017 the vast majority of national public health reference laboratories in EU/EEA countries had access to whole genome sequencing based typing of diverse microbial pathogens for investigations of infection and drug resistance transmission.
The EU/EEA countries are making great progress in the implementation of whole-genome sequencing (WGS) technology for outbreak investigation and surveillance. With a harmonisation of standards, this will enable exchange of WGS-derived data across the EU/EEA as prioritised in the ECDC Roadmap for molecular surveillance and improve disease control and prevention in Europe.
A multi-country outbreak of Salmonella enterica subspecies enterica serovar Agona (S. Agona) is under investigation in the European Union (EU), with cases retrospectively identified back to 2014.