ECDC is monitoring reports from three countries (France, the United Kingdom and the United States) of cases of invasive meningococcal disease (IMD) associated with travel to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).
This issue of the ECDC Communicable Disease Threats Report (CDTR) the period 21-27 January 2024 and includes updates on SARS-CoV-2, influenza, cholera, chikungunya, dengue and zika.
The ECDC Communicable Disease Threats Report (CDTR) is a weekly bulletin for epidemiologists and health professionals on active public health threats. This issue covers the period 27 May - 2 June 2018 and includes updates on dengue, ebola virus disease, yellow fever, Cholera, monitoring environmental suitability of Vibrio growth in the Baltic Sea, Nipah virus disease, West Nile virus, Salmonella Agona, Rapid emergence of resistance to new antibiotic. β-lactamase inhibitor combination Ceftazidime-Avibactam.
ECDC promotes the performance of external quality assessment (EQA) schemes, in which laboratories are sent simulated clinical specimens or bacterial isolates for testing by routine or reference laboratory methods. EQA schemes, or laboratory proficiency testing, provide information about the accuracy of different characterisation and typing methods as well as antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) and the sensitivity of the methods in place to detect a certain pathogen or novel resistance patterns.
In July 2014, a panel of two viable isolates of N. meningitidis of the major disease-causing serogroups with three simulated cerebrospinal fluid (non-culture) samples for molecular studies, was sent by UK NEQAS to 30 reference laboratories in the IBD-labnet surveillance network for quality assessment testing. This report summarises the diagnostic results submitted by the participating laboratories.
This report on EQA performance shows that European Reference Laboratories for Meningococci differ in their capacities and the level of characterisation of the distributed N. meningitidis material, but that there have been improvements since the first ECDC IBD-labnet distribution.