# 4062
The ECDC (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) has released its weekly influenza surveillance report, similar to the the US FluView and Canada’s FluWatch.
Not every European country reports every week to the ECDC, and the depth of surveillance and reporting may vary from one nation to the next, so week to week and cumulative numbers may be a bit hard to interpret.
Still, we get some excellent snapshots of subsets of information, including demographic information (age, gender, vaccination status, underlying conditions) of many of those hospitalized with SARI (Severe Acute Respiratory Infection).
I’ve just posted some excerpts. This week’s complete report (Pdf file) can be downloaded at this link.
Main surveillance developments in week 46/2009
- Sentinel surveillance of influenza like illness (ILI)/ acute respiratory illness (ARI): Three countries reported very high intensity, nine countries reported high intensity and 16 countries reported medium intensity.
- Still, most of the countries (seventeen) reported an increasing trend.
- Virological surveillance: Sentinel physicians collected 3903 respiratory specimens, of which 1745 (44%) were positive for influenza virus. All but three of the influenza A sub-typed viruses were type A(H1N1)v.
- Aggregate numbers of pandemic H1N1 2009: As most of the countries stopped counting total number of cases, the aggregated reporting presents the reported number of deaths.
- Hospital surveillance of severe acute respiratory infection (SARI): Three hundred and thirty-five SARI cases were reported, 23% of whom had no known underlying medical condition.
Hospital surveillance – severe acute respiratory infection (SARI)
Weekly analysis – SARI
- In week 46/2009, 335 SARI cases were reported. Since the beginning of this surveillance, seven EU countries have reported 1616 cases including 47 fatalities (2.9%, see Table 5). The trend in numbers of SARI cases has been steadily increasing since week 36, which could be due to improved reporting or reflect the increasing influenza
activity in the reporting countries.- The female/male ratio in week 46 was approximately 1.2 and 66% of cases were younger than 45 years (Table 6).
- Since the beginning of the season, a significant majority of SARI cases related to influenza infection were caused by the pandemic virus (Table 7).
- Of the 92 SARI patients for which treatment status was reported during week 46/2009, 30% received antiviral treatment (Table 8). Nevertheless, it is too early for any conclusion to be made regarding the potential benefits of such treatment.
- Sixty two SARI patients needed intensive care treatment in week 46, of whom at least nine required ventilator assistance (Table 9).
- Fifty five (64%) of 86 SARI cases reported in week 46 developed a complication (Table 12). Of the 111 SARI cases for whom an underlying condition was reported, 22 (20%) had no known medical condition; however, 21 (19%) had more than one underlying condition (Figure 5).
