Exchange of views with Director of ECDC

She began her address by introducing the agency and its work programme. She underlined the value she places on the constructive dialogue between the Parliament and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), and hopes that this collaboration will continue in this parliamentary mandate.

She outlined the role of the ECDC as a risk assesor and its work in partnership with the risk manager (the European Commission), disease control agencies in the Member States and the World Health Organisation. Highlighting the work that the ECDC carries out on nearly 50 infectious diseases, she stressed that influenza is not the sole focus of the agency. Nevertheless she did recognise that many members of the Committee would be interested in recent developments concerning the H1N1 virus. The current priorities for the ECDC are as follows:

 improving the quality and comparability of EU-wide data on infectious diseases, and further strengthening our systems for collecting this data;

 addressing the growing resistance of many microbes to commonly used antibiotics;

 analysing the possible impact of climate change on the spread of infectious diseases in Europe;

 providing high quality scientific advice and guidance on all the key diseases ECDC covers;

 supporting the EU-wide response to the influenza pandemic.

Turning to the pandemic, she informed the Committee that the new virus is now present in all EU Member States, with a number seeing sustained local transmission. Already hundreds of thousands of people in the EU have been infected with pandemic influenza but the distribution is very varied. She emphasised that it is increasingly difficult to give an exact number of cases. Countries with the biggest outbreaks have stopped counting cases as numbers are unreliable. ECDC, like the US CDC and WHO, will soon stop issuing case-counts. As of Sunday 30 August ECDC had had reports of 104 deaths due to the virus in the EU. But this represents only a proportion of the deaths. As with seasonal flu, we need to do studies on excess mortality to get the true picture.

When discussing projections for the coming months, the most likely scenario is that the pandemic will behave in Europe as it has done in the Southern Hemisphere (Australia, Argentina and Chile) this summer, which is their winter. The numbers infected so far in Europe are few, perhaps under 1% of the EU population; in the Autumn and Winter, however, in a worst case scenario we might expect up to 30% of the population to be affected.

Ms. Jakabs acknowledged that the pandemic is bound to put pressure on health services, both primary care and especially the hospital health services. Th number of patients wanting to see a doctor will rise steeply. Even if only a small proportion of those infected become very sick, many people will require hospital care and intensive care services will be especially strained. However, in a piece of good news, she confirmed that national health authorities, the Commission, WHO and ECDC have been preparing for this for years.

Every Member State has a national plan, a state of preparedness and has taken part in crisis simulation exercises. The plans and the preparedness underpinning them have been reviewed and strengthened since 2005, with ECDC organising self-assessments in every country. In addition, there are well functioning systems of EU information sharing and coordination in place.

The floor was then opened to questions from MEPs:

Liese (EPP, DE) warned of the risks of underestimating the threat posed by the pandemic, and encouraged the ECDC to identify at-risk groups that should be targetted for vaccination.

Yannakoudakis (ECR, UK) noted that there has been insufficient uptake for the seasonal flu vaccines, and asked whether the ECDC would be willing to take a more active role in promoting uptake. Zsuzsanna Jakab recognised that this was an issue. She said that the ECDC continues to recommend the seasonal flu vaccine, even during this time of pandemic, especially for high risk groups.

Roth Behrendt (S&D, DE) asked to what extent civil society is involved in the work of the ECDC. Zsuzsanna Jakab said that the ECDC has a long tradition of cooperating with civil society, particularly on HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis.