Fourteenth external quality assessment for Salmonella typing in EU/EEA and EU enlargement countries, 2024

Infection with Salmonella spp. is the second most reported zoonotic disease in humans. In 2023,77 486 cases were reported in the European Union (EU). Salmonella is also associated with the highest number of foodborne outbreaks [2]. The overall EU trend in salmonellosis incidence between 2017 and 2023 has not significantly decreased or increased. To prevent foodborne diseases such as salmonellosis from spreading further it is essential to employ human surveillance systems at different levels to monitor the disease and ensure countries can detect outbreaks early and be able to respond to them. To this end, ECDC set surveillance objectives to monitor trends and carry out multinational outbreak detection of salmonellosis and other pathogens. These objectives contribute to the evaluation and monitoring of prevention and control programmes; identify population groups at risk and in need of targeted prevention; contribute to the assessment of the burden of disease; generate hypotheses on sources and transmission modes, and identify needs for research projects. The fulfilment of these surveillance objectives relies heavily on the data provided by the National Public Health Reference Laboratories (NPHRL) of the EU and European Economic Area (EEA) countries. ECDC commissions an annual External Quality Assessment (EQA) scheme for the serotyping and molecular-based cluster analysis of Salmonella to monitor the typing methods used, data quality and comparability, and the capability of laboratories to perform these methods. This 14th EQA scheme for Salmonella typing (EQA-14) was sub-contracted to the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) and consisted of a serotyping part and a molecular typing-based cluster analysis part. Participants were expected to use routinely applied methods for both parts of the EQA and were assessed on their performance.