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A group of international scientists meets for the first time this week, in Montpellier, France, to advocate the creation of a European equivalent of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC). But political support for the proposal seems unlikely to be forthcoming at present, given the reluctance of the European Union's member states to cede sovereignty over public health policy to the European Commission.

The proposal for a European Centre for Control of Infectious Diseases (ECCID) is being championed by Michel Tibayrenc, from the Centre d'Etude sur le Polymorphisme des Micro-organismes in Montpellier. It has gained the support of several scientific organizations, including the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases. A committee of two dozen scientists has been established to promote ECCID, including Francisco Ayala from the University of California at Irvine; Dan Colley, head of the CDC's Division of Parasitic Diseases; and Koussay Dellagi, director general of the Pasteur Institute in Tunis.

The CDC was created in 1946 and has grown into a national disease prevention agency with nearly 7,000 staff. It runs large programmes for detecting and investigating health problems, carrying out research and control, training health professionals and promoting common policies in public health. An equivalent made up of the European Union and the countries of eastern Europe is needed in particular, argues Tibayrenc, to counter the threat of emerging and re-emerging diseases.

“In Europe, we have very poor coordination [of public health research and policy],” says Jean-Claude Piffaretti, chairman of the Swiss Society of Microbiology and a member of the new committee. He adds that a European CDC could create a much needed “big fundamental research effort in infectious diseases” and provide a focus for European efforts in developing countries.

The need for a more coordinated European effort in public health seems to attract a broad consensus among researchers and policymakers. But political support for a centralized public health agency is missing.

“Public health is politically very sensitive; we are talking about communicable diseases and big stakes in the economy of a nation,” says one official from the European Commission's public health directorate. Individual member states would be reluctant to have a supranational body scrutinizing their national health systems, he says.

Indeed, the principle of a centralized organization, which was promoted by the European Parliament, was recently rejected by the Council of Ministers. Under the compromise agreement they reached, a network for the epidemiological surveillance and control of communicable diseases will link public health centres in member states with each other and with the commission's services.

The ECCID proposal draws attention to gaps in Europe's public health systems. Although the United Kingdom has a well developed Public Health Laboratory Service, Germany and other countries are widely considered to have poor public health systems, for example in surveillance, food safety and vaccination, compared with the United States.