A collaborative study between ECDC, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Union Reference Laboratory (EURL) for Listeria monocytogenes* found a relatively high degree of dissemination of certain listeriosis bacteria in the food chain and in the human population across the European Union (EU).
Ready-to-eat salmon products, such as cold-smoked and marinated salmon, are the likely source of an outbreak of listeriosis that has affected Denmark, Germany and France since 2015.
More than half of the severe listeriosis cases in the European Union belong to clusters, many of which are not being picked up fast enough by the current surveillance system, suggests a new article published in Eurosurveillance. The large-scale study looked into listeriosis epidemiology through whole genome sequencing and found that this method, when implemented at EU-level, could lead to faster detection of multi-country outbreaks, saving up to 5 months of the investigations.
Since the publication of the rapid risk assessment on a multi-country outbreak of Listeria monocytogenes serogroup IVb, multi-locus sequence type 6 (MLST 6) on 6 December 2017, four EU Member States reported seven new confirmed outbreak cases. Two of these cases were fatal.
Monitoring and responding to HIV and hepatitis C among people who inject drugs is the focus of two new reports from the EU drugs agencies EMCDDA and ECDC.