♦ 04 July 2018 ♦ [Relayed from the GARC ERN website] Currently human rabies continues to rage in Algeria. In the last decade, there was an average of 15 to 20 cases of rabies/year with 100,000 to 120,000 cases of bites affecting mostly children under 15 years of age. Following Algeria's participation in MEEREB/MERACON in 2015 and 2018 and the sharing of knowledge and experiences on the ground of the different participating countries and international organizations, they are putting in place a more adequate rabies control program to eliminate animal rabies, which will result in a reduction or even elimination of human rabies cases. [Read more…]  

♦ 01 September 2018 ♦ [Text from F. Cliquet during 10th workshop for rabies] Following this presentation on the History and Activities in the Belgian rabies NRL, I would like to take few minutes to say with some emotion some words about one person from this laboratory, one person we appreciate a lot in our laboratory, a person who contributed in the eighties and nineties to the development of oral vaccines and methods for rabies control in fox populations in Europe. Dr Bernard Brochier, just after obtaining his DVM and PhD diplomas in 1981 started his career at the University of Liège as Head of the service dedicated to rabies and wildlife diseases. From 1997 to 2002, he continued his activities in rabies field at the Pasteur Institute of Brabant as the head of the NRL for rabies. As explained by Sanne, this institute was merged in 2003 to the Scientific Institute of Public Health which has been integrated recently to Sciensano. Bernard is still part of the Viral diseases service of this new institute. Bernard has become an international renowned scientist with more than 160 papers. Bernard was one of the pioneers in the concept of oral vaccination of foxes in Europe and its first implementation in the field. He demonstrated that inactivated vaccines were not efficient for the oral route, and he was highly involved in the validation of oral vaccines, particularly the V-RG which was the unique vaccine used in Belgium. He developed the methods in the field on small then large scale areas to evaluate the bait uptake in young and adult fox populations, as well as safety, efficacy and quality controls of candidate oral vaccines. He succeeded to publish in the famous review Nature a paper showing the efficacy of the oral vaccination method on large scales areas in Belgium using a recombinant vaccine. Bernard largely contributed to rabies elimination in Belgium which was achieved in 2001. He worked also on many different viruses such as TBE, coronaviruses, hepatitis C and E, Influenza, BSE, Influenza, Puumala, and also on parasites particularly on Echinococcosis multilocularis but also on Toxocara, trichinellosis and toxoplasmosis. He was recently deeply involved in a study of the dynamics of European bat lyssaviruses in a selected colony of bats in which positive bats were recently diagnosed. As part of a larger study on the Epidemiology of TBEV in Belgium, Bernard is currently closely involved in experimental infection studies of locally captured wild rodents to better understand the virus kinetics in these reservoir hosts. We are very sad, as Bernard will leave his group and all of us next September for his retirement, it will be the start of a second life for him and we wish you Bernard all the best for you and your close relatives! We will miss you, and we will remember you as a very friendly collaborator, thank you very much Bernard.  

♦ 02 July 2018 ♦ National veterinary institute (NVI) is a special organization unit of Veterinary faculty at the University of Ljubljana. It operates as public institution of national interest. National reference laboratory for rabies is part of Unit for virology Within NVI. The Unit for virology is located in specialized facilities for laboratory investigation of viral diseases. NVI performs the activities determined by the Law on the veterinary service, on the basis of the concession contract signed between Slovene Veterinary Administration and NVI. Special systemization of NVI is approved by Veterinary Administration NVI is only EU authorized laboratory for testing of blood samples in the frame of pets since 2005. Read full laboratory presentation (for members only ).  

The documents presented during the workshop of 19, 20 and 21 June 2019.  

As an update on the investigation  of the multi-country outbreak of Lm serogroup IVb/ST 6 infections linked to frozen corn and possibly to other frozen vegetables, please find the link to two reports recently published: 1st  update of EFSA-ECDC Rapid Outbreak Assessment : http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/supporting/pub/en-1448 EFSA Technical Report: Urgent scientific and technical assistance to provide recommendations for sampling and testing in the processing plants of frozen vegetables aiming at detecting Lm - https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/supporting/pub/en-1445 We as EURL Lm have further undertook sequencing of food strains linked to this outbreak and Léna BARRE has participated to the expert group which has drafted the 2nd report.

EFSA published the technical report of the urgent scientific and technical assistance to provide recommendations for sampling and testing in the processing plants of frozen vegetables aiming at detecting Listeria monocytogenes. EURL Lm participate to this work as expert.

The 23rd EU-RL/NRLs workshop scheduled at Anses-Fougeres location on June 28th and 29th 2018. Programme

Authors Anna Janowicz, Fabrizio De Massisa, Massimo Ancoraa, Cesare Cammàa, Claudio Patavinoa, Antonio Battistib, Karola Priorc, Dag Harmsenc, Holger Scholzd, Katiuscia Zillia, Lorena Sacchinia, Elisabetta Di Giannatalea and Giuliano Garofolo Abstract [relayed from jcm.asm.org] The use of whole genome sequencing (WGS) using next generation sequencing (NGS) technology has become a widely accepted method for microbiology laboratories in the application of molecular typing for outbreak tracing and genomic epidemiology. Several studies demonstrated the usefulness of WGS data analysis through single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) calling from a reference sequence analysis for Brucella melitensis, whereas gene-by-gene comparison through core-genome multilocus sequence typing (cgMLST) has not been explored so far. The current study developed an allele-based cgMLST method and compared its performance to the genome-wide SNP approach and the traditional MLVA on a defined sample collection. The dataset comprised of 37 epidemiologically linked animal cases of brucellosis as well as 71 isolates with unknown epidemiological status composed of human and animal samples collected in Italy.

Dear colleagues,   Anses has developed a software/web interface (https://leila.anses.fr/) to simplify organisation of Inter-Laboratory Proficiency tests ! This software will facilitate the access to all the information concerning the ILPT (calendar, online registration, documents, reports). Each laboratory has now to create a Laboratory workspace into the software. You can find a tutorial to create your workspace (https://vimeo.com/ansesleila). After this creation, you will be ready for the future ILPT. Hope to see you soon on LEILA!   In case of any further question, please contact us (eurl.brucellosis@anses.fr)

The EURL team organised the first 2018 training session on the 14th and 15th June at ANSES. This 2-day training session focused on control of ELISAs and Rose Bengale (RB) antigens. Eight participants from  Croatia, Ireland, Lithuania, Malta, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Spain performed a successful control of a serum ELISA kit and two RB antigens. It was a good opportunity to exchange on critical points of reagents controls and share experience on protocols and reagents.