PulseNet Europe was established in 2004, and then in 2008 transitioned to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC)(external link).
It is an internationally unique network that - in addition to public health laboratories - has institutions from the veterinary and food sector as equal participants.
PN Europe was funded from September 2004 until November 2006 by the FP network of excellence Med-Vet-Net, a virtual European Zoonosis Centre (www.medvetnet.org(external link)). The main aim was to establish real-time linked surveillance database system to detect infection clusters and investigate outbreaks of Salmonella, verocytotoxigenic E. coli (VTEC) and Listeria monocytogenes in Europe.
The developed web-based molecular surveillance system includes customised BioNumerics software with PN Europe scripts and is fully compatible with other PN networks. The DNA-fingerprinting method used is pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) which has been standardised by PN USA.
The PNE participants represent public health, veterinary and food laboratories from 65 Institutes from 29 countries.
The direct access to specific databases for Salmonella, verocytoxin-producing Escherichia coli and Listeria monocytogenes will ensure a uniform naming of PFGE-subtypes in all participating countries, provide portable data and make it easy for partners to check and compare their own data to the data that are stored in the database. Furthermore, the direct access to comparable typing data for isolates from human infections as well as food and animals will significantly improve the surveillance and trace-back of food-borne infections at the national, European and international level. Also, international clusters of food-borne infections that have too few cases in each country to be detected by the national surveillance systems will be detected through the central PN Europe surveillance system.
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For further information please contact:
Eva Møller Nielsen, Statens Serum Institut, Denmark.
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