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.
The ECDC annual meeting of the European Influenza Surveillance Network (EISN) prepared in collaboration with the EISN Coordination Committee, brought together epidemiological and virological surveillance contact points and representatives from reference laboratories from the 31 EU/EEA Member States as well as participants from EU pre-accession countries, Eastern European Neighbourhood Policy partner countries, the WHO Regional Office for Europe, and involved international institutions.
The influenza season 2016–2017 has now come to an end in Europe. In week 17/2017, all EU/EEA countries reported low influenza activity and the positivity rate (proportion of influenza virus positives among all tested specimens) falling below the 10% benchmark to 9.9%. For the previous six weeks, almost all EU/EEA countries had reported low influenza activity.
The WHO Regional Office for Europe (WHO/Europe) and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) were jointly organising the annual influenza surveillance meeting.
Location:Budapest, Hungary
Organized by:ECDC and the WHO Regional Office for Europe
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.