This report describes the epidemiology of invasive bacterial disease due to Haemophilus influenzae and Neisseria meningitidis in EU and EEA Member States in 2010.
This report presents the results of surveillance of surgical site infections in participating European countries for 2010–2011. The number of reported operations increased and three countries reported data for the first time in 2011.
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.
Each year in the European Union, approximately 4 million patients acquire an infection in hospital and approximately 37 000 of them die as a direct result.
Surgical site infections are among the most common healthcare-associated infections, associated with longer postoperative hospital stay, additional surgical procedures or stay in an intensive care unit, and often higher mortality.
Downloadable Microsoft Excel file containing several tables on separate worksheets based on data collected through ECDC’s The European Surveillance System (TESSy) in 2012.