At the request of the European Commission, ECDC performed a risk assessment after six cases of wound botulism were reported in Norway among people who had injected heroin. As this is an ongoing problem, some relevant measures are proposed for consideration by other EU/EEA Member States.
This report analyses the availability and effectiveness of different types of antitoxins to neutralise type F botulism. A literature review was performed in consultation with the European Medicines Agency.
In May 2012 a collection of five strains of Haemophilus spp was sent to 28 participating reference laboratories in the IBD-labnet surveillance network for quality assurance testing. The laboratories were asked to characterise the five strains by performing standard laboratory protocols for the methods usually used by the laboratory for: species identification, biotyping and serotyping by serological methods and/or PCR.
The results of this EQA are published in the this report.
The results of this external quality assurance distribution have shown that European Haemophilus reference laboratories differ in the level of characterisation of strains, ranging from simple speciation to full identification and typing. All but two laboratories routinely phenotypically serotype isolates. Fifteen laboratories (52%) performed PCR-based capsular genotyping, 23 laboratories (79%) reported antimicrobial susceptibility testing results.
Botulism is a serious paralytic illness caused by a nerve toxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. The disease may occur after eating foods containing the toxin or due to development of the spores within the intestine of young children or within wounds.
Downloadable Microsoft Excel file containing several tables on separate worksheets based on data collected through ECDC’s The European Surveillance System (TESSy) in 2012.
This report describes the epidemiology of invasive bacterial diseases due to Haemophilus influenzae and Neisseria meningitidis in the European Union Member States in 2008 and 2009. Out of the 30 EU/EEA Member States, 29 submitted data.