EURGen-RefLabCap was initiated as a four-year project on the “provision of EU networking and support for public health reference laboratory functions for antimicrobial resistance in priority healthcare- associated infections” by the Consumers, Health, Agriculture and Food Executive Agency (CHAFEA), on behalf of the Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety (DG SANTE of the European Commission) and in close cooperation with the European Centre of Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). The project started in December 2020 and will finish in December 2024.
Starting from 01/04/2021, CHAFEA has ceased to exist and a new agency, Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA), is taking over all related contractual obligations. The contractors for this project are the Technical University of Denmark (DTU Food, Denmark) and the Statens Serum Institut (SSI, Denmark).
This project is complementary to ECDC’s European Antimicrobial Resistance Genes Surveillance Network (EURGen-Net). It will provide capacity building activities including training, external quality assessment (EQA) schemes and networking activities to support NRLs in improving their capacities in detection, phenotypic and genotypic characterization of carbapenem- and/or colistin-resistant Enterobacterales (CCRE) and two additional healthcare-associated pathogens of public health relevance. The overall aim is to strengthen capacities for national surveillance and outbreak investigation of CCRE and improve the availability and quality of European-level molecular surveillance data.
The project will focus on antimicrobial-resistant pathogens whose predominant modes of transmission are healthcare-associated, including carbapenem- and/or colistin resistant Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
Funded by the European Union Service Contract no. SC 20197401