Health ministers agreed that the mission and tasks of the Centre would be limited to communicable diseases and health threats of unknown origin (2). Any possible extension of this mission will be assessed at a later review of the work of the Centre. Some changes were brought to the text with a view to ensure that the Centre would not be entitled to regulatory powers. Other issues discussed included voting rules and the composition of the management board of the Centre.

The Commission's original proposal for the regulation establishing the Centre was published in September 2003 (3). The Centre is intended to mobilise and significantly reinforce the synergies between the existing national centres for disease control. The Centre will provide EU policy makers and citizens with authoritative and independent scientific advice on serious health threats, and recommend control measures and coordinate intervention teams allowing a rapid and effective EU-wide response (4).

The proposal for the establishment of the Centre has already been before the Economic and Social Committee of European Parliament. The opinion of the rapporteur was adopted on 29 October 2003 (5). The Committee took note of recent global events, notably the SARS epidemic and the threats of bioterrorism in the United States and Japan, and concluded that the EU needed a systematic and structured approach to controlling communicable diseases and other serious health threats, which would require a substantial increase in long term funding.

The Committee considered that the remit of the Centre should include surveillance, and the networking of existing laboratories, to achieve rapid harmonisation of surveillance methods and the provision of high level scientific advice. The Committee also stated that in some instances, technical assistance should not be limited only to EU Member States and that the EU should be able to obtain help from and/or provide help to other Community agencies, the World Health Organization, humanitarian medicine and foreign agencies. The Centre is intended to be small in size yet highly influential, because of its synergies with national institutes. Interestingly, the Committee had some doubts as to whether the Centre would be able to begin operating with such a small number of staff (30 in the first year, rising to 70 in the third).

The regulation will also be scrutinised by the European Parliament's Health and Social Affairs Committee.

The Italian presidency urged the Council to adopt the proposal at the first reading during the first semester of 2004. This would allow the Centre to become operational from early 2005.