The sixth European Scientific Conference on Applied Infectious Disease Epidemiology (ESCAIDE) opened today at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC).
While many European countries are progressing towards TB elimination, the target of less than 1 TB case/ 1,000,000 population is still far from being achieved everywhere. This was one of the messages presented today by ECDC Director Marc Sprenger during the joint session with WHO "Towards elimination of tuberculosis" at the European Respiratory Society annual congress.
The annual meeting of the healthcare-associated infections surveillance network (HAI-Net) and of the HAI-Net coordination group took place in Stockholm on 19-21 June 2012.
With more than 32 000 cases, gonorrhoea was the second most commonly reported sexually transmitted infection (STI) in Europe in 2010. As data from the ECDC report Gonococcal antimicrobial susceptibility surveillance in Europe 2010 illustrates, gonococci have become more resistant to common agents for treatment and show reduced susceptibility to newer antibiotics. “This indicates the risk that gonorrhoea may become an untreatable disease in the near future”, stresses ECDC Director Marc Sprenger.
The focus of the 2012 TB surveillance network meeting was the performance indicators of TB programmes and on enhancement and harmonisation of treatment outcome monitoring (TOM) of MDR-TB.
This expert meeting was part of the ECDC project on chlamydia control in Europe and aimed to provide EU Member States with evidence-based information that is needed for the development and evaluation of chlamydia control strategies and to monitor progress in chlamydia control in Europe.
WHO “SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands” is an annual campaign that makes part of major global effort to support healthcare workers to improve hand hygiene practices in healthcare settings, and thus support the prevention of often life-threatening healthcare-associated infections.