Weekly releases (1997–2007) - Volume 5, Issue 48, 29 November 2001

The number of cases of HIV infection in eastern Europe is rising faster than anywhere else in the world, according to a report published by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO) on 28 November (1). The latest figures, published to coincide with this year’s World AIDS Day on 1 December, show that there were more than 75 000 new diagnoses of HIV infection in Russia between January and early November 2001, a 15-fold increase in just three years.

European health ministers are planning to strengthen and extend the existing European Union's (EU) communicable diseases network so that it can be used in the event of bioterrorist attacks (1). The network already links national surveillance institutes, and EU legislation lists the communicable diseases that need to be placed under community wide surveillance by using standardised collection and analysis of data (2). The box shows diseases to be included in the surveillance network.

This report gives details of the number of isolates identified by the national reference laboratories in countries collaborating with Enter-net, the international surveillance network for salmonella and Escherichia coli, in the third quarter of 2001 and incorporated in the Enter-net salmonella database. The total number of human salmonella isolates reported between July and September 2001 is 36 977. Of these, 32 596 (88.1%) were S. Enteritidis, S. Typhimurium, S. Virchow, or S. Hadar. Seventeen countries have supplied data, 16 of these in electronic form.

After an epidemic of meningococcal disease caused by Neisseria meningitidis serotype W135 among travellers to the haj pilgrimage to Mecca in 2000, an enhanced surveillance system for serogroup W135: 2a: P1.2, 5 meningococcal disease was set up among several European countries (1, and references therein). Data have been reported since September 2000, and this report summarises all confirmed cases during the period from 29 September to 26 October 2001.