HIE Library Archive 1998/9  

From: Julius Weinberg  PHLS Headquarters London - with kind permission from Eurosurveillance Weekly

It is well known that communicable diseases know no boundaries. Travel and trade have led us to reconsider our concepts of populations at risk, and therefore of the appropriate mechanisms for dealing with communicable disease threats to health. Communicable disease incidents will increasingly have an international component and responding in a timely, appropriate manner will depend on knowing colleagues who work in other countries and understanding how their systems operate.

The inventory of the means of controlling communicable disease in the European Union (EU), Norway, and Switzerland has been carried out to provide a description and analysis of the existing resources for the monitoring and control of communicable diseases in the EU’s 15 member states and later expanded to include Norway and Switzerland. It is an ambitious project funded by Directorate General V of the European Commission and led by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Rome, Italy), in collaboration with the Public Health Laboratory Service (London, United Kingdom) and the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease (Stockholm, Sweden).

The results of the project are now available in a concise written report in all EU languages and as an interactive read-only compact disc (CD) (in English, French, and German). Both can be obtained by writing to the address below.

Topics on the CD include:

how the participating countries organise the monitoring and control of communicable diseases; the availability of expertise in epidemiological and microbiological investigation and in the management of serious and highly contagious infections; research in progress on the monitoring and control of communicable diseases;
contact details for the epidemiological and microbiological resources including national surveillance centres and reference laboratories.

The CD is fairly easy to use, but the interface is not immediately intuitive. The help function provided should enable most people to access the information. There are one or two areas where the interface could be improved. For example, when downloading a contact it is not clear that the download is saved as a table in an Access database called ‘export’ - after downloading one may wonder where it has gone!

The Istituto Superiore di Sanità should be congratulated on pulling together such a vast amount of information. The inventory should become one of the cornerstones of international collaboration in communicable disease surveillance. Circulation of the CD should stimulate improvement in the quality and amount of information available - there are gaps which will need to be filled. As the project leader Stefania Salmaso points out, for this resource to be truly useful it will need to be maintained and the systems to do this are not yet in place. The database should ultimately be made available on the internet and updated continually. This will require commitment and resources.

I look forward to being able to find, from the internet, the key information needed to mount an effective international response to a communicable disease threat. This inventory is a major step on the way to that goal.

The report can be obtained from the European Commission, Directorate General V, Bâtiment Jean Monnet, Plateau du Kirchberg, Luxembourg.