Eurosurveillance - Volume 9, Issue 9, 01 September 2004

Clostridial infections in injecting drug users in the United Kingdom are a relatively new phenomenon that came to light in 2000 when cases of serious illness and deaths due to Clostridium novyi were recorded. In the period December 2003 to April 2004, the Anaerobe Reference Laboratory received twelve referrals of an extremely rare isolate, Clostridium histolyticum, from cases of infection in injecting drug users submitted from nine different hospitals in England and Scotland. Molecular typing of these isolates by two different methods of pulsed-field gel electrophoresis and PCR ribotyping revealed they are all indistinguishable, indicating a common source of the infections, most probably a batch of heroin that was recently distributed across the UK.

Comparable figures on disease incidence between countries are difficult to attain. We therefore compared risk of infection for Swedes going to other European countries. We took as the numerator the number of imported cases from European countries of campylobacter and giardia infection in the national Swedish surveillance database, and as the denominator, the number of visitors to each country from a commercial database on foreign travel. Risk of infection in tourists was also compared to national incidence figures for a selection of countries.

In Greece, HIV/AIDS surveillance is conducted by the Hellenic Centre for Infectious Diseases Control. The AIDS case reporting system was implemented in 1984, followed by notification of HIV infections in 1998. This article presents surveillance and trend analysis of paediatric HIV infection and AIDS, including cases identified prior to 1998. The number of HIV infected children in Greece is relatively low, raising to a cumulative total of 69 cases by June 2003, 44 (64%) of whom are thought to have been infected through mother-to-child transmission. Thirty three paediatric AIDS cases have been reported since the onset of epidemic, with Pneumonocystis carinii pneumonia being the most frequent opportunistic infection.