Eurosurveillance - Volume 18, Issue 7, 14 February 2013

We present estimates of influenza vaccine effectiveness (VE) in Navarre, Spain, in the early 2012/13 season, which was dominated by influenza B. In a population-based cohort using electronic records from physicians, the adjusted VE in preventing influenza-like illness was 32% (95% confidence interval (CI): 15 to 46). In a nested test-negative case-control analysis the adjusted VE in preventing laboratory-confirmed influenza was 86% (95% CI: 45 to 96). These results suggest a high protective effect of the vaccine. .

We conducted a test-negative case-control study based in five European sentinel surveillance networks. The early 2012/13 adjusted influenza vaccine effectiveness was 78.2% (95% CI: 18.0 to 94.2) against influenza B, 62.1% (95% CI: ?22.9 to 88.3%) against A(H1)pdm09, 41.9 (95% CI: ?67.1 to 79.8) against A(H3N2) and 50.4% (95% CI: ?20.7 to 79.6) against all influenza types in the target groups for vaccination. Efforts to improve influenza vaccines should continue to better protect those at risk of severe illness or complications. .

Real-time systematic monitoring of the number of infections diagnosed in our clinical microbiology laboratory in Marseille recently drew attention to the fact that the incidence of gonorrhoea was 10-fold greater from September through December 2012 than during same months of previous years. We also found an increase in the annual incidence of syphilis and human immunodeficiency virus seroconversion. Our system allowed timely identification of an increase in sexually-transmitted infections in Marseille for the whole year of 2012.