ECDC: On Air

Today ECDC has a special episode on the recent salmonella outbreak linked to chocolate products in Europe. Principle Expert in Food and Waterborne Diseases, Johanna Takkinen, speaks to us about what salmonella is, where it comes from, how it can spread, and what symptoms to look for. 

You can find ECDC's Epidemoloigical Update related to salmonella (with links to national food safety authorities) here, and you can read ECDC's Rapid Outbreak Assessment here.

You can find additional information from the European Food Safety Authority.

For more news and information please visit ecdc.europa.eu or follow us on social media. 

On today's episode, we speak with Dr Piotr Kramarz as he discusses his recent field mission to Poland, and working with the Polish health authorities to assist the large numbers of Ukrainian refugees. 

You can find more information about ECDC's on the Ukrainian crisis here and here. 

For more information about ECDC, please visit ecdc.europa.eu, or follow us on Social Media.

In recognition of World Tuberculosis day on March 24th, we will be hearing from Rob van Hest, Public Health TB Control Physician and Epidemiologist in the Regional Public Health Service of Groningen, Netherlands. Rob has extensive experience in TB screening and treatment, especially among urban risk groups such as the homeless and high-risk drug users, as well as asylum seekers. You will hear Rob discussing capture/recapture analysis, a method of measuring the impact of TB, its spread and control, and how to combat under-reporting.

This recording was made before the covid-19 pandemic began.

You can find more information about TB here.

For more information about ECDC, please visit ecdc.europa.eu, or follow us on Social Media.

Dr Rob van Hest's PhD on Capture-recapture methods in surveillance of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.

Eurosurveillance article on the Completeness of tuberculosis (TB) notification: inventory studies and capture-recapture analyses, six European Union countries, 2014 to 2016.

Dr. Rob van Hest (MD, MSc, PhD) works as a Public Health TB Control Physician and Epidemiologist in the Regional Public Health Service of Groningen. He has extensive experience in TB screening and treatment. In 2007 he completed a PhD thesis on the use of capture-recapture techniques for the surveillance of TB and other infectious diseases.

On today's episode, we speak with Laura Espinosa, Epidemic Intelligence Expert at ECDC, about Epitweetr. This tool allows users to automatically monitor trends of tweets with the aim of detecting public health threats early. It was designed to support public health experts with the early detection of threats from infectious diseases but can be extended to all hazards and other fields of study by modifying the topics and keywords.  

You can find more information about Epitweetr here, or see the Epitweetr page on Github.

You can find more information on ECDC here, or follow us on Social Media for the latest news.

In this episode, we are joined by René Niehus, Expert in Mathematical Modelling, in order to find out more about how ECDC uses models in public health. We get to understand the different kinds of data that can go into models, and how continually analysing new data can build better models in the future. 

You can find more information on the COVID-19 Forecasting Hub here.

You can find more information on ECDC here, or follow us on Social Media for the latest news.

On today's episode, we sit down with Julien Beauté, Expert in General Surveillance. We discuss ECDC's surveillance activities and how the surveillance process works from collection to output for diseases such as measles, HIV, and of course more recently COVID-19. 

To find out more about ECDC's surveillance data, please click here.

For more general information on ECDC please visit ecdc.europa.eu or follow us on Social Media.

The 31st of December 2019 began as normal for Jordi Borrell Pique, the Epidemic Intelligence Officer on duty for ECDC. Soon, media reports began to arrive of patients showing signs of a ‘pneumonia of unknown etiology’ linked to a wet market in Wuhan. For this episode, we sit down with Jordi to recount those early days of COVID-19 at ECDC and remember how quickly things changed. For more information about COVID-19 and ECDC, please visit us at ecdc.europa.eu or follow us on social media.

In today's episode we speak with Teymur Noori, HIV/AIDS expert at ECDC. Teymur explains what the HIV/AIDS situation looks like in Europe, which populations and regions are most affected, and what goals that have been set, and how to reach them. 

Find out more via ecdc.europa.eu/en/hiv-infection-and-aids