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(BRUSSELS) – The EU Parliament and Council agreed Monday to reinforce the role of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and improve Europe’s preparedness for future health challenges.
The revised ECDC mandate will allow the agency to take a stronger role in supporting the EU and its Member States in the prevention and control of communicable disease threats and improve European preparedness for future health challenges.
The provisional deal was welcomed by the Commission. “Since the start of the pandemic, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has been at the forefront of our common efforts to face this unprecedented situation, providing timely and clear risk assessments and maps to facilitate safe free movement, tracking the virus outbreak in the EU and recommending measures to control it,” it said in a statement. “Today’s agreement means state-of-the-art surveillance of future outbreaks, more joint preparedness and response planning with Member States, stronger guidance during emergencies and more support to Member States at all stages of health crisis management, including through the assistance of a standing, ready-to-be-deployed EU Health Task Force.”
To generate timely and comparable data, the ECDC will coordinate the standardisation of data collection procedures, data validation, analysis and dissemination of data at EU level. It will also develop risk assessments and maintain databases for epidemiological surveillance and work towards harmonised approaches to data collection and modelling in order to produce comparable EU-wide data.
The ECDC will cooperate with the Commission, national authorities and relevant EU bodies and agencies to ensure their respective activities are consistent and complement each other. It will also work in close cooperation with international organisations in the field of public health, in order to avoid duplication of efforts. In particular, the closer collaboration with the World Health Organisation (WHO) will include areas such as monitoring and reporting on trends in communicable diseases and exchanging information on unusual epidemic phenomena or new communicable diseases of unknown origin, including those in third countries.
The Centre will also:
- establish an EU Health Task Force of experts to assist with preparedness and response planning as well as with local response to outbreaks, in coordination with the European Union Civil Protection Mechanism and other international mechanisms;
- monitor the capacity of national health systems to detect, prevent, respond to and recover from communicable disease outbreaks, identify gaps and provide science-based recommendations;
- organise visits to the member states to provide additional support to the national preparedness and response planning activities;
- ensure that experts and stakeholders, including civil society organisations, contribute to its advisory work;
- provide technical and scientific assistance to national authorities to develop their capacity to detect and sequence the genomes of infectious agents;
- monitor the uptake of vaccination against major communicable diseases across the EU, taking into account the specificities of national and regional vaccination schedules;
- facilitate fighting against misinformation on vaccination and the causes of vaccine hesitancy.
The Parliament and Council now need to endorse the agreement before it can enter into force.
Further information, European Parliament
