Report of the third Joint Meeting of the ECDC's Food‐ and Waterborne Diseases and Zoonoses Network and of the EFSA's Zoonoses Monitoring Data Network

The third Joint Meeting of the ECDC's Food‐ and Waterborne Disease and Zoonoses Network and of the EFSA's Zoonoses Monitoring Data Network was held on 16 and 17 October 2017 in Parma. The meeting was constructed around the principle of ‘One health approach to collaborative response to foodborne disease outbreaks in EU/EEA’ and served as an opportunity for public health authorities and food safety/veterinary authorities to meet and exchange information on the procedures implemented at country level for the investigation of, and response to, multi‐country foodborne outbreaks. On this occasion, the tools available at European Union level for early signal detection of and response to multi‐country foodborne events were presented, including the Epidemic Intelligence and Information System for food‐ and waterborne diseases (EPIS‐FWD), Early Warning and Response System (EWRS) platform, Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) platform and the FoodChain‐Lab tool. The topics discussed included examples of recent multi‐country outbreaks in the EU: an event of SalmonellaEnteritidis linked to contaminated eggs originating from Poland and an outbreak caused by a new, previously unknown Salmonella serotype and linked to imported contaminated sesame seeds. The countries involved, ECDC and EFSA, as well as the European Commission gave an overview of their contribution to the investigation and management of these outbreaks. Several EU‐wide projects were presented in the meeting, including ENGAGE, INNUENDO, COMPARE, Swiss One Health project and EuroCigua project. The inter‐active session at the end of the meeting offered the opportunity to identify and prioritize the gaps in the collaborative efforts to better responding to foodborne outbreaks at the national and EU level.