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The ECDC (European Centre For Disease Prevention and Control) has been operating at an elevated alert level since last April and the discovery of the novel H1N1 virus.
They’ve published a daily (Mon-Fri) 2009 influenza A (H1N1) pandemic update since that time.
While the virus remains a threat, the number of cases in European countries appear to have peaked weeks ago and are now on the decline.
Today – nine months after the virus was first detected – the ECDC has decided to suspend their daily summaries. They will now go to a weekly reporting format.
The numbers collected by the ECDC, like those of the WHO (World Health Organization) and others, only represents a fraction of the actual cases (including deaths and hospitalizations) that have occurred.
The are, as they say, a `gross underestimation’ of the true number of cases. Still, they’ve provided a good deal of insight into the progression of the pandemic across Europe.
Some excerpts, therefore, from the ECDC’s last daily update.
Main developments in the past 24 hours
The last ECDC Daily Update;
Updates from US and Canada included;
A total of 2 292 fatal cases in Europe and EFTA countries and 12 086 in the rest of the world have been reported up to date.
The last Daily Update
The ECDC Public Health Event Strategy Team (PST) decided yesterday to downgrade our crisis management activities to Public Health Event level 0 (PHE 0).
ECDC has been operating its pandemic response in under a crisis management plan since April 2009, diverting significant resources from other parts of the organisation to respond in a robust and coherent way.
Although the pandemic is far from over and considerable uncertainties on developments in the coming months exist, currently the workload related to pandemic response has clearly decreased. The ECDC activities related to the pandemic will continue under a reinforced influenza programme.
We will now stop publishing the Daily Updates. The surveillance work will be reported on Fridays in the Weekly Influenza Surveillance Overviews (WISO) with a technical overview of influenza development in a technical successor to the previous Flu News along with the Weekly Executive Update giving a digest of the technical reports and reporting on ECDC activities. All of these outputs will be published on our website.
Epidemiologic update
All 27 EU and 4 EFTA countries are reporting cases of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 influenza. A total of 2 292 deaths have been reported since April 2009 (Table 2).
From week 41 to 51 the numbers of deaths each had shown a steady increase almost doubling every fortnight over six weeks. The fall observed in weeks 52 and 53 was to be expected as it represents official reports placed on national web-sites and a number of Member States have not been doing this in what was a holiday week. While the most deaths have to date been in Western Europe there are increasing numbers of deaths being reported from Central and Eastern Europe.
The reported cumulative fatal pandemic (H1N1) cases in the world have now passed 10,000 cases (Table 2). However, because of lack of laboratory confirmation and underreporting among other factors, this is likely to be a gross underestimation of the true number of fatalities associated with the pandemic. Available updates on hospital admissions, per Member State, can be found in Table 1.
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