A number of European countries (including Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom) indicate an increase seen during 2022, particularly since September 2022, in the number of cases of invasive Group A Streptococcus (iGAS) disease among children less than ten years of age.
Focusing on two recent public health emergencies related to tick-borne diseases in two EU countries, ECDC experts investigated the public health response and specifically the involvement of the communities.
ECDC will start monitoring disease distribution in the EU and collecting EU data through the epidemiological surveillance network comprising the European Commission, ECDC and national authorities for epidemiological surveillance.
Vector sampling protocols outlining the recommended methods for collecting vectors have been issued today by ECDC and EFSA, to support entomologists and public-health professionals in Europe. It is a first attempt to summarise best-practices in terms of methods and strategies for sampling mosquitoes, sandflies, biting midges and ticks.
ECDC releases today an update of its tick-borne diseases communication toolkit to support public health authorities in devising communication initiatives as part of their tick-borne diseases prevention programmes.
2014, the focus of World Health day was on vector-borne diseases. World Health Day is a worldwide initiative celebrated every year on 7 April to mark the anniversary of the founding of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1948.
On 8 March, the Health Protection Agency in the United Kingdom reported an additional fatal case of anthrax in Suffolk, England. It concerns a person who injected heroin. This brings the number of anthrax cases among injecting drug users in the EU to 14, since June 2012.