Today my wife and I had the pleasure of a quick tour of ECDC's headquarters in Solna. The previous HQ, an old building on the campus of the Karolinska, had a lot of charm but wasn't up to the needs of a modern health agency.
Credit: ECDC
ECDC moved into its new digs about a year and a half ago, farther out in Solna, a Stockholm suburb. The building features offices and meeting rooms built around a six-storey atrium; the view from the cafeteria on the top floor is a panorama of Stockholm.
Credit: ECDC
Most impressive was the Emergency Operations Centre, where ECDC's Epidemic Intelligence Division works and everyone gathers at 11:30 a.m. for an update on the current situation—dominated, of course, by Ebola (one of the clocks on the wall is set to Kinshasa time).
Credit: ECDC
ECDC also publishes Eurosurveillance, a weekly journal of studies into current and potential threats to European public health. Here's an example from today's issue: Population-level surveillance of antibiotic resistance in Escherichia coli through sewage analysis. The abstract:
Introduction
The occurrence of antibiotic resistance in faecal bacteria in sewage is likely to reflect the current local clinical resistance situation. Aim This observational study investigated the relationship between Escherichia coli resistance rates in sewage and clinical samples representing the same human populations.
Methods
E. coli were isolated from eight hospital (n = 721 isolates) and six municipal (n = 531 isolates) sewage samples, over 1 year in Gothenburg, Sweden. An inexpensive broth screening method was validated against disk diffusion and applied to determine resistance against 11 antibiotics in sewage isolates. Resistance data on E. coli isolated from clinical samples from corresponding local hospital and primary care patients were collected during the same year and compared with those of the sewage isolates by linear regression.
Results
E. coli resistance rates derived from hospital sewage and hospital patients strongly correlated (r2 = 0.95 for urine and 0.89 for blood samples), as did resistance rates in E. coli from municipal sewage and primary care urine samples (r2 = 0.82). Resistance rates in hospital sewage isolates were close to those in hospital clinical isolates while resistance rates in municipal sewage isolates were about half of those measured in primary care isolates. Resistance rates in municipal sewage isolates were more stable between sampling occasions than those from hospital sewage.
Conclusion
Our findings provide support for development of a low-cost, sewage-based surveillance system for antibiotic resistance in E. coli, which could complement current monitoring systems and provide clinically relevant antibiotic resistance data for countries and regions where surveillance is lacking.
