Europe's CDC

By May of this year, the European Union is aiming to have a new Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in operation to help combat communicable diseases among its 25 member states. High-profile critics have worried publicly that the new agency will be a lame duck, with no labs of its own and too little cash to do the job it needs to do. For Zsuzsanna Jakab, who was appointed this month as the new agency's chief, bringing the scientific community on her side is a high hurdle she must jump, but it is far from the only one. "It will be quite a challenge to set up this new center, but a beautiful one professionally," says Jakab, who was formerly the Hungarian health ministry's top public servant.Earlier this month, she outlined for The Scientist some of the issues she'll be tackling first. Priority number one is getting some staff on board: "I will be the only person working for the center for the time being, so my idea is that I would like to recruit a core staff on a short-term contract for a number of months." Jakab is an administrator, not a scientist, so she wants to employ folks with technical expertise. "I plan, for example, to have a deputy [at] the center who can cover the scientific and research issues. My deputy and I will make a good team," she says.How about those absent lab facilities? Jakab sees it as a strength rather than a weakness. "The main difference between the ECDC in Europe and the CDC in Atlanta is that we are not going to set up our own infrastructure and institutional system, because we do not want to have a parallel system in Europe," she says. The ECDC will be based on the "European model," acting as a hub for expertise in EU member countries. "This will be the major challenge for this center, to bring all these networks together," she acknowledges. "This will add value, [I'm] pretty sure, to the present, ongoing prevention and control activities."As for the resources needed to achieve this task, Jakab faces more challenges. The EU has allocated for the ECDC a measly €4 million for 2005, €14 million in 2006, and €29 million in 2007 – amounts some researchers have openly derided. Jakab acknowledges that the budget is tight, especially for 2005, but she points out that the idea for the ECDC came up only a year ago, long after the EU's long-term budgets were allocated. "So we have to live with this situation during the next three years, but my plan is to make sure that after the first two years – lets say around 2006 – there is a proper external evaluation, so we review the progress made and then that will give [us] a chance to see whether the scope of the center should be expanded in any way."For the present, though, communicable diseases will be the main focus, she says, not just new diseases and bioterrorism. There are old enemies too: "Even in the European Union countries it is astonishing to see that the number of HIV/AIDS infections has doubled since 1995," says Jakab. "And therefore we have to take that as an absolute priority.""I could well imagine that the scope of the center would be reviewed by the council and the European Parliament," says Jakab, "and there might be a real possibility of expanding its scope – as it is already mentioned in the founding regulation – toward health monitoring and toward other non-communicable diseases."

Europe's CDC

By May of this year, the European Union is aiming to have a new Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in operation to help combat communicable diseases among its 25 member states.

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