TY  - JOUR
A1  - Thiberville, Simon-Djamel
A1  - Schilling, Stefan
A1  - De Iaco, Giuseppina
A1  - Fusco, Francesco Maria
A1  - Thomson, Gail
A1  - Maltezou, Helen C.
A1  - Gottschalk, René
A1  - Brodt, Hans-Reinhard
A1  - Bannister, Barbara
A1  - Puro, Vincenzo
A1  - Ippolito, Giuseppe
A1  - Brouqui, Philippe
T1  - Diagnostic issues and capabilities in 48 isolation facilities in 16 European countries: data from EuroNHID surveys
T2  - BMC Research Notes
N2  - Background: Highly infectious diseases (HIDs) are defined as being transmissible from person to person, causing life-threatening illnesses and presenting a serious public health hazard. The sampling, handling and transport of specimens from patients with HIDs present specific bio-safety concerns. Findings The European Network for HID project aimed to record, in a cross-sectional study, the infection control capabilities of referral centers for HIDs across Europe and assesses the level of achievement to previously published guidelines. In this paper, we report the current diagnostic capabilities and bio-safety measures applied to diagnostic procedures in these referral centers. Overall, 48 isolation facilities in 16 European countries were evaluated. Although 81% of these referral centers are located near a biosafety level 3 laboratory, 11% and 31% of them still performed their microbiological and routine diagnostic analyses, respectively, without bio-safety measures.

Conclusions: The discrepancies among the referral centers surveyed between the level of practices and the European Network of Infectious Diseases (EUNID) recommendations have multiple reasons of which the interest of the individuals in charge and the investment they put in preparedness to emerging outbreaks. Despite the fact that the less prepared centers can improve by just updating their practice and policies any support to help them to achieve an acceptable level of biosecurity is welcome.
KW  - Diagnostic techniques and procedures
KW  - European Union
KW  - Communicable diseases
KW  - Infection control
KW  - Patient isolation
KW  - Critical pathway
Y1  - 2012
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/27434
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-274343
SN  - 1756-0500
N1  - © 2012 Thiberville et al. ; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
VL  - 5
IS  - 527
PB  - BioMed Central
CY  - London
ER  -