Surveillance of invasive pneumococcal disease in 30 EU countries: Towards a European system?
Authors
Germaine Hanquet, Anne Perrocheau, Esther Kissling, Daniel Levy Bruhl, David Tarragó, James Stuart, Paweł Stefanoff, Sigrid Heuberger, Pavla Kriz, Anne Vergison, Sabine de Greeff, Andrew Amato-Gauci, Lucia Pastore Celentano, ECDC Country Experts for Pneumococcal Disease.
Reference
Vaccine 2010; 28: 3920-8.
An overview of surveillance of invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) in EU countries. I was invited to a consortium of IPD experts to prepare this overview on behalf of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and develop recommendations for EU-wide surveillance. Following the survey of countries and few month discussions we had a face to face meeting, where we agreed on the recommendations. We concluded that to start a European IPD surveillance, the optimal approach would be to start collecting information on meningitis cases in a uniform way, and monitor circulating serotypes through a dedicated network on hospitals. It was an interesting project and I learned a lot from these excellend experts!