Article 12 of the ECDC Founding Regulation gives details on the Centre’s role in communications:

Communications on the activities of the Centre

• The Centre shall communicate on its own initiative in the fields within its mission, after having given prior information to the Member States and to the Commission. It shall ensure that the public and any interested parties are rapidly given objective, reliable and easily accessible information with regard to the results of its work. In order to achieve these objectives, the Centre shall make available information for the general public, including through a dedicated website (...).
• The Centre shall act in close collaboration with the Member States and the Commission to promote the necessary coherence in the risk communication process on health threats.
• The Centre shall cooperate as appropriate with the competent bodies in the Member States and other interested parties with regard to public information campaigns.

Responsible for these activities is the Health Communication Unit.

From the basis in the regulation, the ECDC activities in the area of health communication have three directions:

• Efficiently communicate the scientific and technical output of the ECDC to professional audiences.
• Communicating key public health messages and information to the media and to the European public.
• Support the development of Member States communication capacities.

Efficiently communicate the scientific and technical output of the ECDC to professional audiences

The main scientific output from ECDC is disseminated through the technical and scientific reports, which are authored by internal and external experts. To give maximum visibility to the reports, there is often a launch event with an interactive “webinar”, in which scientists and journalists around Europe have the opportunity to ask questions from and comment to a panel of authors having produced the report.

The reports and other scientific output of the Centre are available on the ECDC portal. The new web portal launched in 2009 will be the common gateway to all ECDC scientific resources, including providing access to information in databases such as the ECDC surveillance database (TESSy).

As of March 2007, the journal Eurosurveillance is hosted by ECDC. Eurosurveillance is published in an online weekly version with short rapid communications and longer surveillance and research articles. All longer and many of the shorter articles are also published on paper in a quarterly print compilation. The journal covers all aspects of communicable disease epidemiology, prevention and control from a European perspective, and the electronic releases have around 15,000 subscribers.

Communicating key public health messages and information to the media and to the European public

It is a huge task to reach out to the 500 million citizens of the EU. The health problems and concerns also differ from country to country. ECDC therefore works closely with the national authorities to have maximum impact of its public health messages. To be directly accessible by people in all the EU Member States, the Centre is setting up a multilingual website in all official EU languages, as well as Norwegian and Icelandic. The multilingual website will contain general information on the Centre and some basic disease facts. The multilingual content will gradually grow over the coming years.

Press and other media is another important channel to reach the EU citizens. ECDC is therefore proactively working with the media. Procedures are in place for timely consultations with the European Commission and the Member States to promote coherence in the risk communication.

Support the development of Member States communication capacities

ECDC is supporting Member States communications activities by providing training in risk communication, bringing in a communications perspective in ECDC country visits (e.g. on pandemic preparedness planning), and gradually building a resource centre in crisis and health communication that can support country communication activities, e.g. on information campaigns.