Weekly releases (1997–2007) - Volume 6, Issue 40, 03 October 2002

David Byrne, Europe’s Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection, reiterated the European Commission’s commitment to the creation of a European centre for disease control by 2005 at the 2002 meeting of the European Health Forum Gastein (EHFG, http://www.ehfg.org/) (1,2). The centre will bring together the expertise in member states and will act as a reference and coordination point both in routine and crises situations. The Commission also plans to establish a health portal for online information by 2004.

Five cases of legionnaires’ disease have been reported in British people who all stayed at a hotel in Belgium in the ten days before onset of illness. All have been confirmed as L. pneumophila serogroup 1, one by culture of the organism and four by urinary antigen detection. The first case, who died, was a 63 year old man who became ill on 7 September 2002. He travelled with a small group of ten people, two of whom were reported to have had respiratory symptoms but were negative on testing for legionella infection. Three cases, one male and two female aged between 74 and 84 years were in a party of 46 people on a coach tour to Austria. They became ill between 21 and 24 September and two were hospitalised in France and one in England. The fifth case became ill on the 28 September and is also in hospital in France. This patient (female aged 65 years) was from a third group of 40 British tourists on another Austrian tour. All cases stayed only one night at the hotel in Belgium.

Sixty eight confirmed cases of Salmonella Enteritidis PT 14b (not known to be linked with foreign travel) have been reported to the Public Health Laboratory Service Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre in England (PHLS CDSC) by the PHLS Laboratory of Enteric Pathogens (LEP) since 26 September 2002. Of these the majority (45/68; 62%) were males. The age range of the cases is less than one year to 93 years (median 32 yrs; mean 34 yrs). Where dates of onset are available (n=18) the earliest onset was on 6 September and the latest so far reported is 24 September (figure). The majority of cases are from London and south east England. There is an outbreak in north Hampshire (south of England), which is being investigated locally. Four of nine cases in that outbreak have eaten food from a local café and, in addition, two people from outside the local area who were on holiday there have a link to the café. Trawling interviews are also being conducted of cases not linked with north Hampshire in order to generate hypotheses for the outbreak food vehicle.

A paper published in the Lancet this week describes the first case of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in Italy (1). The patient, a 25 year old Sicilian woman, developed clinical symptoms in 2001 and was first reported in February this year (2). Although definitive diagnosis of vCJD requires neuropathological confirmation, the woman’s illness fulfils the diagnostic criteria for probable vCJD (3), a brain scan was characteristic of vCJD and the abnormal protein associated with vCJD has been detected in a tonsil biopsy.

On 28 September 2002 a sporadic case of a lyssavirus in a Daubenton’s bat (Myotis daubentonii) was detected in the United Kingdom (UK) using the fluorescent antibody test, as reported in this week’s Communicable Disease Report (1). Further tests on the bat sample were performed, including a rabies tissue culture inoculation test and pan lyssavirus polymerase chain reaction. These confirmed the presence of a lyssavirus.