This report provides an analysis of the external quality assessment (EQA) for the antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) performance of laboratories participating in the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network (EARS-Net) in 2019. A total of 952 laboratories (1–95 per country) from 30 EU/EEA countries participated in the EQA exercise.
This report presents the results of the sixth round of the external quality assessment (EQA-6) scheme for Listeria monocytogenes (L. monocytogenes) typing organised for laboratories providing data to the Food- and Waterborne Diseases and Zoonoses Network (FWD-Net) managed by ECDC.
This report presents the results of a proficiency test to evaluate the inter-laboratory reproducibility and portability of Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) genome assemblies in the EU/EEA.
This report presents the results of the eighth round of the external quality assessment (EQA-8) scheme for typing of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) organised for laboratories providing data to the Food- and Waterborne Diseases and Zoonoses Network (FWD-Net) managed by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).
The data on antimicrobial resistance in zoonotic and indicator bacteria in 2017, submitted by 28 EU Member States (MSs), were jointly analysed by EFSA and ECDC. Resistance in zoonotic Salmonella and Campylobacter from humans, animals and food, and resistance in indicator Escherichia coli as well as meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in animals and food were addressed, and temporal trends assessed.
A multi-country outbreak of 12 listeriosis cases caused by Listeria monocytogenes sequence type (ST) 8 has been identified through whole genome sequencing (WGS) analysis in three EU/EEA countries: Denmark (6 cases), Germany (5) and France (1).
Ready-to-eat salmon products, such as cold-smoked and marinated salmon, are the likely source of an outbreak of listeriosis that has affected Denmark, Germany and France since 2015.
This report presents the results of the fifth round of the external quality assessment (EQA-5) scheme for typing of Listeria monocytogenes organised for laboratories in the Food- and Waterborne Diseases and Zoonoses Network (FWD-Net).
More than half of the severe listeriosis cases in the European Union belong to clusters, many of which are not being picked up fast enough by the current surveillance system, suggests a new article published in Eurosurveillance. The large-scale study looked into listeriosis epidemiology through whole genome sequencing and found that this method, when implemented at EU-level, could lead to faster detection of multi-country outbreaks, saving up to 5 months of the investigations.