SECID

“Annual Influenza Meeting of Southeast European Countries”, Stockholm, Sweden.

📍On 10-11 June 2024, epidemiologists and laboratory experts from all the SEE countries gathered in the “Annual Influenza Meeting of Southeast European Countries”, which was organized in 🇸🇪Stockholm, Sweden.

The SEE regional meeting serves as a forum for gathering epidemiologists and laboratory experts from all 10 countries of the SEE region to share the latest data, best practices, improvement of laboratory support, and challenges of implementation of integrated respiratory viruses’ surveillance.

The Southeast European (SEE) countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Moldova,Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Kosovo*) have a longstanding collaboration in the field of 🦠influenza and integrated surveillance of respiratory viruses.

SEE countries have already established and improved Influenza-like illness (ILI) and Severe Acute Respiratory Viruses Infection Surveillance and improved 🔬🧪laboratory capacities over the years.

During the last years the countries have been working to integrate influenza, COVID -19 and RSV surveillance and improve quality of 📊data and their capacities.

“Annual Influenza Meeting of Southeast European Countries”, Stockholm, Sweden.

📍On 10-11 June 2024, epidemiologists and laboratory experts from all the SEE countries gathered in the “Annual Influenza Meeting of Southeast European Countries”, which was organized in 🇸🇪Stockholm, Sweden.

The SEE regional meeting serves as a forum for gathering epidemiologists and laboratory experts from all 10 countries of the SEE region to share the latest data, best practices, improvement of laboratory support, and challenges of implementation of integrated respiratory viruses’ surveillance.

The Southeast European (SEE) countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Moldova,Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Kosovo*) have a longstanding collaboration in the field of 🦠influenza and integrated surveillance of respiratory viruses.

SEE countries have already established and improved Influenza-like illness (ILI) and Severe Acute Respiratory Viruses Infection Surveillance and improved 🔬🧪laboratory capacities over the years.

During the last years the countries have been working to integrate influenza, COVID -19 and RSV surveillance and improve quality of 📊data and their capacities.

The objectives of the meeting were:

👉🏻Identifying the role of 💻digitalized information systems to improve the quality of data and integrated surveillance of respiratory viruses and the next important steps for countries.

👉🏻Exchangeing experiences and best practices on mosaic surveillance framework evaluation for respiratory viruses.

👉🏻Identifying the best use of current surveillance systems data to measure 💉vaccine effectiveness, burden of disease and mortality, and how to improve them.

👉🏻Identify the challenges and strategies to maintain NICs and other respiratory virus current laboratory investments in SEE countries.

Happy New Year 2024! 🎄

📍South East European Center for Surveillance and Control of Infectious Diseases (SECID), organized the “Third Regional Meeting on Influenza Vaccination” in Belgrade on October 23-24, 2023, to discuss the progress of 🦠💉 influenza vaccination and lessons learned from COVID-19 in SEE countries.

SECID has a long-standing collaboration on and preparedness,pandemic preparedness, and .
📑 In the previous regional meeting, operational issues were discussed, related to the implementation of seasonal influenza vaccination programs, improvement of the current strategies and overcome challenges by exploring the opportunities to ensure affordable prices by improving process and cross border collaboration.

📌 The aim of this third regional workshop on influenza vaccination is to exchange countries
experiences on influenza and COVID-19 vaccination programs implementation, identify COVID-19 pandemic impact on influenza vaccination, challenges, possible solutions, and
recommendations.

The COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on influenza vaccination and adult vaccination
programs, highlighting the need for a life-course approach to establishing new programs or
increasing the amount of influenza vaccines procured in the countries. Also, COVID-19
pandemic fatigue and attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccination may impact trends in
influenza vaccination uptake in certain population groups.

📝This meeting brought fruitful discussion and presentation on:
- Exploring strategies to foster short-term influenza and COVID-19 vaccine program improvement to increase uptake especially among key target risk groups.
-Identifying country and cross border actions to address possible gaps and challenges on improving the access to influenza and COVID-19 or other epidemic or pandemic vaccines timely and with affordable prices.
- Impact of COVID-19 pandemic response and vaccination on influenza vaccination programs of SEE countries.
- Identifying strategies for integration of influenza and and others or program platforms following a whole life-course approach.

The Third Regional Influenza Vaccination Meeting was organized by South East European Center for Surveillance and Control of Infectious Diseases (SECID) with the support from The Task Force for Global Health, The Partnership for Influenza Vaccine Introduction (PIVI) and South-Eastern Europe Health Network - SEEHN.
This meeting brought together participants from working on immunization programs and experts from Task Force for Global Health, CDC, WHO Regional Office for Europe, Balkan hub, WHO office in Belgrade, RCC and SEEHN.

📍On 12 October 2023, a meeting on "SARI Integrated Surveillance for FLU and COVID-19 and Information System of Infectious Diseases” took place in Gjirokaster with the participation of the epidemiologists from local health care unit of Kruja, Fieri, Vlora, Gjirokastra and doctors dealing with respiratory diseases in the hospital of Gjirokastra. This meeting was organized by the Public Health Institute supported by the Southeast European Center for the Control of Infectious Diseases (SECID), in the framework of the improvement of Sentinel SARI Surveillance. The participants discussed the notification form of SARI cases in the system as well as the issues and challenges of this surveillance.
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Experts comments on One Health Dashboards:
" Creating communication bridges among different surveillance systems where integrated data can be seeing from different prospective and can be jointly analyzed"
" One Health Dashboards starts with people and trust among them"
" Having this new system established is having all the relevant stakeholders involved."...

Please click on the link below to watch the video: https://youtu.be/AL2i0su8iHM

One Health Dashboards: Experts Comment Silvia Bino (Albania), Kujtim Mersini (Albania), M. Salim Uzzaman (Bangladesh), Syed Mursalin (Pakistan) and Esron Karimuribo (Tanzania) comment on various a...

🇦🇱 🇦🇲Albania-Armenia Joint COVID-19/Influenza Program Improvement Workshop, May 10-11, 2023, Tirana, Albania.

💉In order to support the latest and international recommendations on the integration of vaccination programs and to support the approach of vaccination to the whole life, a joint workshop was organized between Albania and Armenia, to exchange their experiences and define the plan of integration with the support of and experts, USA and MMGH, Germany, on May 10-11, 2023 in Tirana, Albania.

💉🦠COVID-19/Influenza Program Improvement Workshop focused its discussions on sharing experiences with -19 program implementation and discuss challenges and recommendations identified through program evaluation activities. Also, participants talked and brought to attention importance of exploring new strategies to foster short-term COVID-19 vaccine program improvement and increase coverage, specifically booster doses, among risk groups.

Integration of COVID-19 vaccination with other immunization (specifically influenza) or primary health care platforms including vaccine demand, vaccine safety, health workforce development, (electronic) immunization information systems leading to development of plans for additional interventions were topics raised on working groups. At the end country teams map out the key next steps, timelines, and roles and responsibilities with concrete action points using planning template.

📍Institute of Public Health in collaboration with UNICEF and The Partnership for Influenza Vaccine Introduction (PIVI) Program organized during April 4 workshops with more than 50 particpants, chief vaccinators and vaccinators from regions of Tirana, Shkoder, Vlorë, Elbasan.
Institute of Public Health aims continuous improvement of safety and the functioning throughout the country.

Particpants discussed ways of vaccine transport from national to regional and subregional levels, safe storage of vaccines including COVID-19 vaccine, roles and responsibilities of the chief vaccinator within the structure of the Local health units and the vacinator at the health facility level.

https://youtu.be/UH3ZJcnaWcU

Raportimi i medias në pandemi, gazetaria shkencore e rëndësishme në kohë krizash Raportimi në kohë pandemie sfidoi gazetarët dhe redaksitë më të sprovuara në botë. Informacioni i pakët dhe ndryshimi i shpejtë i situatave solli krizë në ra...

📌 Southeast European Center for Surveillance and Control of Infectious Diseases (SECID) in partnership with the (WHE) Balkan Hub and WHO Regional Office for Europe, under the framework of a /USA-supported project on improving program and other pathogens, organized a sub-regional workshop aiming to learn more about media reporting and science journalism in , on 21-23 March 2023, Vienna, Austria.

45 journalists, public health experts and specialists from 9 Southeastern European countries/areas came together on Training Program emphasizing the important role of media as key players in public health by communicating information, reshaping perceptions of risk and targeting communities to protect health.

The training programme provided participants with a forum to expand their skills for and learn key practical insights on the application of and principles to media reporting as an important tool of a successful response to emergencies and crisis.

and from the perspective of leading science journalists were also discussed with guest speaker, Kai Kupferschmidt, a contributing correspondent for Science magazine, who shared his experience and brought real-life practical examples of communicating health science in emergencies.

Happy !

What’s the most efficient way to protect poultry from ?

measures are crucial for securing the production sector and trade, safeguarding food security and the livelihoods of farmers, and to limit the risk of human infection.

Technical Meeting of the SEEHN Regional Health Development Centers “Strengthening SEEHN technical collaboration” 15-16 March 2023, Tirana, Republic of Albania.

https://youtu.be/tNYAA1KuG8Y

EpiCore: Small Commitment, Big Impact EpiCore: Crowdsourcing Outbreak Verification!Created in 2012 by Ending Pandemics as an initial partnership among TEPHINET, ProMED, and HealthMap, and officia...

📌Vaccination is one of the public health priorities and Albania has a well-organized vaccination program. Building new vaccination programs such as those against COVID-19,seasonal flu, the introduction of new vaccines such as HPV, the emergence of new diseases such as monekypox, requires a well-coordinated program in terms of forecasting, planning and vaccine management, not only at the central but also at the local level.

📌 During the month of January-February 2023, several microplanning workshops were organized with the local health control unit in the region of Tirana, Vlora and Shkodra. These workshops were organized by Institute of Public Health (IPH) with the support of South East European Centre for Infectious Diseases (SECID) and The Task Force for Global Health (PIVI Program).

📌 Microplanning workshops aims to increase the capacities in the management of the vaccination program at local level, by providing detailed training in terms of methods of forecasting vaccines at the local level, as well as preparation of local plans and management of vaccines, as well as micro-plans according to health centres and the areas or municipalities they cover.

Southeast European Center for Surveillance and Control of Infectious Diseases wishes you all a Merry Christmass and a Happy New Year 2023! 🎄

📌On 15-16 December 2022, specialists from the Ministry of Health , Institute of Public Health and WHO Office in Kosovo* carried out a study visit in Albania to learn about building a digital system for the surveillance of infectious diseases.

📍The meeting took place at the Institute of Public Health, where colleagues from IPH, Albania and SECID’s team presented the Digital Surveillance System of Infectious Diseases in Albania, SISI. Some of the discussions focused on the importance of a digital surveillance system and how it has evolved in Albania, the components and functions of SISI system and the path to the integrated 'One Health' system.

The second day of the meeting continued with field visits in Tirana public health directory, health care center, private laboratory and Tirana University Hospital Center ,to learn more about challenges and experiences of all system users.

At the end of the meeting a follow up plan was discussed among both institutes and SECID.

ADVANCED TRAINING WORKSHOP- Strengthening Surveillance and Causality Assessment of Adverse Events Following Immunization In SEEHN Countries.

📌The South East European Centre for Surveillance and Control of Infectious Diseases – SECID, in collaboration with World Health Organization European Region, the Centers of Disease Control, USA and Task Force for Global Health has convened an advanced training workshop on surveillance and causality assessment of adverse events following immunization (AEFI), held in Tirana, Albania from 30th November to 2nd December 2022.

🧑‍💻👩‍🏫With the participation of lecturers in person and remotely from WHO Regional Office for Europe, Canada, Germany, Estonia, Serbia, US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, and Uppsala Monitoring Center, this very intense 3 days training and work had a great interest and brought a lot of discussion on the table.

The aim of the workshop was to provide guidance and technical advice to national experts from Southern-eastern Europe Health Network countries on strengthening surveillance and causality assessment of AEFIs, by updating the national policies procedures and tools on surveillance of AEFIs to further strengthen the national mechanisms to detect, respond, assess causality and communicate effectively on serious adverse events following immunization.

📝During the workshop participants learned about the guidance, best practice and resources available on AEFI surveillance, causality assessment and communications, and reviewed the opportunities to improve the organization and functioning of the national AEFI surveillance systems.
Every country was committed to improve their AEFI systems and causality assessments. Each country came up by the end of the workshop with a draft plan for actions on improving their systems engaging drugs regulators, immunization programs and other national stakeholders.
Also multiple cross-cutting issues were identified among all countries that could be addressed by regional approaches.

The workshop was attended by about 50 participants consisting of national experts involved in surveillance and review of AEFI cases representing national immunization programs; pharmacovigilance units of national drug regulatory authorities; representatives of the national expert committee involved in assessing the causes and classification of AEFIs; representatives of medical universities, responsible for graduate and post-graduate educational programs on pharmacovigilance and AEFI surveillance in the country.

📍Sarande, Albania- Institute of Public Health Albania, Department of Control and Surveillance of Infectious Diseases supported from South East European Center for Infectious Diseases (SECID), on 21 October 2022, organized a meeting with theme “Improvement of the integrated surveillance system Flu & COVID-19 and other infectious disease surveillance, digital approach and their challenges in Albania”. This meeting brought together epidemiologists and specialists from local health care units in Albania to meet and to discuss challenges and address gaps from their daily work on surveillance of infectious diseases in a digital approach.

Presentation on Infectious Diseases Surveillance and reporting on SISI, Alert Surveillance, Ili Sari Integrated Surveillance, Event Based Surveillance, Hiv- Aids and Tb Surveillance, highlighted the work and the problems that must be addressed in the proper functioning of the entire infectious disease surveillance system in Albania.

In the second part of the meeting, the participants were divided into working groups according to 4 counties (Shkodra, Tirana, Elbasani and Vlora), where it was discussed case notification on SISI and also each county draw up a training plan for the implementation of reporting in the digitalized surveillance system at the district level.

📍Institute of Virology, Vaccines and Serums “Torlak” in Beograd, organized a training on “Biological material sampling, molecular and serological diagnostics of respiratory viruses”.
🦠🧪A two-day training on specimen collection and molecular detection of respiratory pathogens - multiplex PCR (day 1) and serological diagnostic methods for respiratory pathogens (day 2) took place at The Institute of Virology, Vaccines and Sera “Torlak".
🗓 The training was conducted on 13-14 September 2022, in the Laboratory Diagnostics Division.
The 10 trainees were comprised of staff from various health institutions in Serbia: City Institute of Public health Belgrade, University Clinical Centre of Serbia - „Vatreno oko laboratory", Institute of Public Health Pozarevac, Institute of Public Health Sabae, Institute of Public Health Sremska Mitrovica and Institute of Public health Pancevo.
During the two days, both the trainers and the participants shared valuable experiences of the best practices in molecular and serological diagnostics from their labs, especially related to respiratory pathogens.

June 2022 - The Bulgarian Society for Innovative Medicine (BSIM) during the month of June organized meetings within the project "Improving Influenza Program and Enhancing Influenza and other viral respiratory pathogens through integration of all existing surveillance systems and using one health surveillance approach", in collaboration with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Southeast European Center for Surveillance and Control of Infectious Diseases (SECID). These meetings brought together health experts from various institutions and sectors such as the Ministry of Health (MOH), Regional Health Inspectorate (RHI), Multidisciplinary Hospitals for active treatment, Bulgarian Food Safety Agency (BSFA), National Center for Infectious and Parasitic Diseases (NCIPD).

The first meeting took place on June 3-4 and some of the topics that were discussed were;
 Influenza Sentinel and ARI Surveillance, clinical sample collection, storage and transport, data analysis, interaction and information sharing with BFSA.
 Organization and control of bird flu surveillance. Measures to contain and eradicate a bird flu outbreak.
 Review of the capacities of influenza surveillance and ARI/ILI.
 Influenza vaccines and challenges for seasonal influenza vaccination.
 In addition, the surveillance of severe acute respiratory infections as part of the existing web-based ARI and influenza surveillance system was reviewed and discussed.

The second meeting was organized on June 24-25, with the some of following topics discussed:
 The general aspects and goals of the Influenza and Acute Respiratory Infections Surveillance System in Bulgaria.
 The participants were introduced to the types of clinical investigation for the diagnosis of patients with influenza and ARI, the types of tests for influenza viruses and real-time PCR tests for the detection of other common respiratory viruses.
 Serological methods for the research of non-influenza respiratory pathogens, diagnostic procedures for SARS CoV-2 typing, available techniques for the detection of ARI and their causative agents were presented. Testing methods for non-influenza respiratory viruses and post-vaccination antibody testing for COVID-19, as well as testing indications, were explained.
 During the discussion, representatives of multidisciplinary hospitals shared their experience and the challenges they face in collecting and submitting data.
 The last flu season and preparedness for the next flu season, vaccination coverage, the need for timely delivery of seasonal flu vaccines and measures to improve vaccine coverage were also discussed.
 Issues related to COVID-19 and what can be predicted for the 2022/2023 season were also discussed.

The "Pandemic Preparedness Plan" workshop concluded the third and final phase with a two-day meeting organized on July 12-13, in Sofia, Bulgaria, by SECID (South East European Centre for Infectious Diseases) with the support of CDC Atlanta and WHO.
This event brought together around 40 epidemiologists, surveillance professionals, laboratory professionals, emergency response teams, immunization teams, Ministry of Health Representatives, communication specialists within the SECID network and participants from CDC and WHO HQ/WHO Euro and head of SEEHN Secretariat.

The main objectives of the meeting were:

👉🏻Identifying gaps to support country pandemic plan revision.
👉🏻Development of concrete steps for capacity building.
👉🏻Reviewing emergency response activities and using any existing pandemic plan to evaluate strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, commonly called a SWOT analysis, to identify opportunities for improvement in each country, to determine what worked well, what issues were raised and to develop adaptation plans and capacities for use in future responses.
👉🏻Identifying tools, guidance addressing gaps and priorities.

On the second day of the training a Post Workshop Session was organized on the topic "An Agile, Digitized, Integrated Infectious Disease Surveillance System - Challenges and Needs".

“The development and architecture of the digitized integrated surveillance system, its benefits and challenges in Albania” was presented by Kujtim Mersini, PHD, Vet.
The following discussions focused on the 👉🏻current development of digital platforms developed by SECID member countries in response to COVID-19 or progress on previously existing ones, 👉🏻the country's challenges and needs for building an integrated agile surveillance system, 👉🏻digitizing the surveillance and response systems and exploring further opportunities to adopt free open source systems or to adopt and share modules already developed in SEE countries

June 1, 2022 - The Institute of Public Health of Serbia (IPHS) conducted the "Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) Analysis of the main aspects of pandemic preparedness and response". This activity covered aspects such as epidemiological surveillance capacities, laboratory diagnostics, entry point capacities and risk communication. The coordination function as well as capacities for hospital treatment and isolation, self-isolation, contact tracing and quarantine were discussed.
This activity is a follow up to the workshop held in February “Pandemic Preparedness Planning”, click the link below for more information:(https://www.facebook.com/633041680095488/posts/5108513995881545/?d=n)

11 May 2022- National Institute of Public Health, Kosovo *

Workshop on "Pandemic Preparedness and Response-SWOT Analysis", as a follow up of the workshop held in February “Pandemic Preparedness Planning”, (click the link for more information: https://www.facebook.com/633041680095488/posts/5108513995881545/?d=n).

Training on “Event Based Surveillance (EBS)”.

SECID (South East European Center for Surveillance and Control of Infectious Diseases) is organizing the second round of trainings on “Event-based surveillance” in some regions of Albania. (Find here the last training👉🏻 https://www.facebook.com/633041680095488/posts/5010966188969660/?d=n )

On 6-7 June 2022 the EBS training was held in Vlora, Orikum and Novosele.
The first day was in the form of a workshop, where the concepts of event-based surveillance and the steps followed for implementation were presented, as well as event reporting in the integrated system of infectious diseases SISI.
The second day of the training continued in the field, distributing leaflets in the most populated areas such as bakeries, pharmacies, nurseries and meetings were held with the staff of the area who will report on the event.

Albania was the next country within the SECID's network, that organised "SWOT analysis of some aspects of pandemic respons".
The working group met in Korca, on 27-28 May 2022, to present, analyse and discuss the lessons learned during the Covid- 19 pandemic, based on Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) and the challenges to improve future pandemic response.

Republic of Sprska, BiH- SWOT Analysis Workshop

May 10, 2022, Public Health Institute of the Republic of Srpska organized a workshop regarding the SWOT ( strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of the surveillance system and response to ARI infections, as a follow up to the workshop held in February “Pandemic Prepardness Planning”, click the link ( https://www.facebook.com/633041680095488/posts/5108513995881545/?d=n)
Members of this working group are experts dealing with epidemiological and virological surveillance of respiratory infections, IHR contact persons, COVID coordinators and stakeholder representatives. Representatives of the two largest health institutions in the Republic of Srpska also participated in the workshop, namely the University Clinical Center of the Republic of Srpska and the Banja Luka Primary Health Center. Representatives of these two institutions are physicians who have worked on the most difficult clinics and departments in the pandemic and whose experience in creating further recommendations is crucial. The appointed working group is now continuing to develop a SWOT analysis of this system for ARI infections and the results will be presented at a regional meeting.

March 2022- SECID organized a study visit in North Macedonia. The meeting was held at Institute of Public Health in Skopje, were “Digital Integrated Surveillance Systems” of both countries were presented.

Meeting with the directors of RHDCs on Communicable and Non-communicable Diseases

✅17 March 2022 - Dr. Mira Dasic, Director of the SEEHN Secretariat, held a meeting in Skopje with directors of the two SEEHN RHDCs, Prof. Silvia Bino, SEEHN RHDC on Communicable Diseases (SECID), hosted by the Institute of Public Health of Albania and Dr. Milica Stanisic, RHDC on Non-communicable diseases (NCDs), hosted by the the Institute of Public Health of Montenegro.
✅Starting with the conclusions from the Ad-hoc Plenary Meeting related to the Fifth Ministerial Forum, the dialogue continued with defining the specific role the RHDCs would play at the high-level forum and beyond; to act as satellites of health expertise and deliver health data for information-based decisions leading towards adopting adequate health policies.
✅The interlocutors concluded that there is space for a more visible role for the RHDCs and agreed to continue advocacy for new directions of action and new projects as well as all other initiatives related to public health that might be of interest for the Region. With that in mind, a visit to Albania has been included in the agenda for this year.