The sixth European Scientific Conference on Applied Infectious Disease Epidemiology (ESCAIDE) opened today at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC).
Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) or carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae (CPE) are highly resistant to antibiotics, leaving only a few options for treatment of infected patients, and thus represent a serious threat to public health.
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.
The general objective of the expert consultation was to draft a proposal for case definition and case classification of dengue and chikungunya fever suitable for surveillance in continental 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.
Adjustments to surveillance practices in the EU will enhance preparedness and public health response to emerging infectious diseases, thereby helping to contain human and economic costs. These are the conclusions of an article published this week in Science magazine, describing a study co-authored by ECDC.
This workshop enabled all to agree on the relevance of EPIS VPD to be used as a platform for the reporting and monitoring of measles outbreak in the EU, agree on the type of information to be reported, the nature of outbreaks to be notified and the further usage by ECDC (e.g. European Monthly Measles Monitoring1) and other Member States of data that will be shared through EPIS VPD by countries.
A meeting and a workshop on the ECDC point prevalence survey (PPS) of healthcare-associated infections and antimicrobial use in acute care hospitals took take place in London on 5-6 March 2012.
The chikungunya virus outbreak that occurred in 2007 in northern Italy (Emilia-Romagna region) prompted the development of a large scale monitoring system of the population density of Aedes albopictus (Skuse, 1894), comparable at the provincial and municipal levels. In 2007, egg density data presented an aggregated distribution (VMR >1) and Taylor's power law was applied to calculate the minimum number of ovitraps needed to obtain the prefixed precision levels: D=0.2 in the areas where the chikungunya epidemic occurred and D=0.3 in all the other urban areas >600 ha.