| European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control | |
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| Seat | Solna Municipality, Stockholm County, Sweden |
| Signed | March 2004 |
| Established | March, 2005 |
| Director | Dr Marc Sprenger |
| Website | ecdc.europa.eu |
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) is an independent agency of the European Union (EU) aimed [1] at strengthening Europe's defences against infectious diseases. It was established in 2005 and is located in Solna, Sweden.
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As EU economic integration and open frontiers increased, cooperation on public health issues became more important. While the idea of creating a European CDC had been discussed previously by public health experts, the outbreak of SARS in 2003 and its rapid spread across countries confirmed the urgency of the creation of an EU-wide institution for public health. ECDC was set up in record time for an EU agency: the European Commission presented draft legislation in July 2003, by the spring of 2004 ECDC’s Founding Regulation had been passed and by the spring of 2005 the Centre started operating. As it started its activities, another threat – H5N1 avian influenza arriving in the EU’s neighbourhood and the fear that it could adapt or mutate into a pandemic strain of human influenza – confirmed the relevance of its mission.
The Centre changed its operational structure in 1 April 2011. Now, it operates in a matrix structure with four units. Seven Heads of Disease Programmes, in the Office of the Chief Scientist, will coordinate the existing disease programmes. They will draw on expertise from specialists in two shared resources units, the Surveillance and Response Support and the Public Health Capacity and Communication unit. In addition, a Resource Management and Coordination unit will provide administrative support and host cross-cutting coordination functions such as the Microbiology Coordination. Changes in the organisation were made following internal and external consultation and assessment of the functioning of the old structure. They are intended to enable us to enhance ECDC’s added value and contribution to improving the health of European citizens. ECDC has established six cross-cutting programmes: Respiratory Tract Infections (Influenza – Tuberculosis); STI including HIV and blood-borne viruses; Vaccine Preventable Diseases; Antimicrobial Resistance and Healthcare-Associated Infections; Food and Water-Borne Diseases and Zoonoses and Emerging and Vector-Borne Diseases.
ECDC publishes scientific and technical reports on various issues related to communicable diseases prevention and control, including comprehensive reports from key technical and scientific meetings.
In November 2010, ECDC published its fourth Annual Epidemiological Report on Communicable Disease in Europe (AER). The data presented show that EU citizens, in general, enjoy a high level of protection against infectious diseases. For some diseases further joint actions (e.g. through vaccination and similar control measures) could lead to the EU, and eventually Europe, being declared ‘free’ of the disease, as is the case for several vaccine preventable diseases.
This report presents the analysis of data reported for 2008 by the 27 EU Member States and three EEA/EFTA countries: Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. The main aim of this report is to provide some indication, based on the available data, of where the main burden of communicable diseases now lies in the European Union.
Eurosurveillance, a European peer-reviewed journal devoted to the epidemiology, surveillance, prevention and control of infectious diseases, has been published by ECDC since March 2007. This partnership helps ensure results from ECDC and the EU-funded surveillance networks are rapidly reported to the scientific community. Eurosurveillance is an open access (i.e. free) web-based journal that reports infectious disease issues from a European perspective. The weekly bulletin and monthly journal have recently merged to a unique scientific journal. New issues are available online for free every Thursday. Eurosurveillance was previously a project shared between an editorial team based at both the Institut de Veille Sanitaire (France), and the Health Protection Agency (United Kingdom) since 1995 and financed by the European Commission.
The ECDC’s network comprises the following member countries:
The 27 EU Member States: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom;
And EEA Countries: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway
ECDC is set to have a staff of around 300 and an annual budget of over € 50 million by the end of the decade.
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