ECDC to be strengthened
In future, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control should also be able to provide practical assistance in the prevention of health risks.
UM – 11/2020
The European Commission wants to improve
public health safety by strengthening the European
Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), based in Solna, Sweden. The
latter is to be assigned more tasks as well as more personnel to fulfil such
tasks. On 11th November 2020, the European Commission presented a draft regulation governing this, thus forming one of the
building blocks of the European Health Union proposed by it.
The ECDC is still not perfect
The work of the ECDC is not easy. The
Member States are responsible for health-related matters and, at best,
coordination of activities is carried out through information provision and on
a voluntary basis. To develop vigour is usually difficult. The EU is
called in whenever there is a crisis, coupled with a practical problem. The
measures, as the coronavirus crisis has shown, are often not coordinated.
Moreover, the flow of information is slow. Digitisation could remedy this
situation, provided that sufficient staff are available to enter the relevant
data. In other words: The development of the ECDC into a strong authority
is a challenge as well as closely linked to the further development of national
health and disease prevention institutions.
Germany drives strengthening of the ECDC
Against the background of the COVID-19
pandemic, the extension of the ECDC's mandate suits the current times
perfectly. Up to now, management of health protection has tended to be at the
national level. Traditional institutes such as the Robert Koch Institute in
Berlin, the Institut Pasteur in Paris or the National Health Institute of Spain
(Instituto Nacional de Gestión Sanitaria). Therefore, the stimulus from the
German side to strengthen the European level and the ECDC is
remarkable.
On the way to a real health authority
Currently, about 280 employees work in the
Solna office. The ECDC is to provide monitoring data and scientific advice on
communicable diseases subject to notification, disease outbreaks and other
public health threats. The EU Commission's draft regulation now provides for
improvement of ECDC's monitoring system and gives it the opportunity to provide
practical support in the form of specific recommendations for action to the
Member States and to coordinate pandemic plans with them. The ECDC is to become
a genuine EU health agency, on which Member States can rely for crisis
prevention and response, and which can also mobilise assistance teams in
emergencies and deploy them where help is needed.