Weekly releases (1997–2007) - Volume 12, Issue 9, 01 March 2007

As of March 2007, Eurosurveillance is the independent scientific in-house journal of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Stockholm, Sweden. After over 10 years’ successful collaboration between the Institut de Veille Sanitaire in Paris, France and the Health Protection Agency in London, United Kingdom under the auspices of the European Commission, the ECDC now takes over the funding and publishing of the journal.

On 5 January 2007, two soldiers from a military base in Warsaw, Poland, presented with symptoms indicating fulminant sepsis. The soldiers were admitted to intensive care units in two different hospitals. Neisseria meningitidis was isolated from blood and cerebrospinal fluid in the case of one patient and from blood only in the case of the other, and sent to the National Reference Centre for Bacterial Meningitis (NRCBM) for further characterisation.

A Chlamydia trachomatis variant has been identified in patients in Sweden that harbours a 377 base pair deletion in the ORF1 in the C. trachomatis cryptic plasmid. There is no evidence for the presence of this new C. trachomatis variant outside Sweden, however, we wanted to assess whether this variant was circulating in Oslo, in order to implement new procedures for optimal specificity and sensitivity in detecting urogenital C. trachomatis infections.