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.
Polio is an infectious disease mostly contracted by children. One in two hundred people develop incurable paralysis after infection. In 1955, a vaccine was invented and was introduced on a wide scale. Thanks to global efforts, polio was eliminated from the Western Hemisphere by 1994, and has greatly decreased worldwide.
This issue of the ECDC Communicable Disease Threats Report (CDTR) covers the period 2-8 August 2020 and includes updates on the Ebola virus disease eleventh outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, poliomyelitis, West Nile virus, COVID-19 associated with SARS-CoV-2, monitoring environmental suitability of Vibrio growth in the Baltic Sea, influenza A(H3N2) variant virus – Hawaii, USA, tick-borne encephalitis in the UK, local transmission of dengue fever in France and babesiosis in the UK.
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.
This issue of the ECDC Communicable Disease Threats Report (CDTR) covers the period 28 June - 4 July 2020 and includes updates on COVID-19, Ebola virus disease, polio, vibrio, West Nile Virus and lyssavirus.
The first report monitoring the progress towards the elimination of hepatitis B and C across European Union (EU) and European Economic Area (EEA) countries has been published by ECDC.
The surveillance of Neisseria gonorrhoeae antimicrobial susceptibility in the European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA) has been co-ordinated by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) since 2009. This surveillance is essential for detecting emerging and increasing antimicrobial resistance and making quality-assured data available to inform treatment guidelines.