Improving tuberculosis surveillance in Europe is key to controlling the disease.

As underlined by the joint ECDC and World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe TB report, launched on 18 March the importance of good surveillance to stem this trend cannot be underestimated.
Where do we go with surveillance in Europe? Can we do more? How many MDR and XDR TB cases occur because of sub-optimal patient management?

This issue of Eurosurveillance casts light on these important questions with four interesting articles.
The results of the studies reported in this issue of Eurosurveillance allow us to point out some key topics:

•The completeness of reporting information (including treatment outcomes), the proportion of culture-confirmed TB cases reported as well as the proportion of strains on which DST for both first- and second-line drugs is performed and reported are still sub-optimal overall in Europe. The relevance of these pitfalls goes beyond the “simple” surveillance limitation, having the potential to affect other important TB control pillars, e.g. infection control and case-management.

•MDR and XDR TB still persist in Europe. The high proportion of MDR TB identified among new TB cases reported by certain countries indicates that sub-optimal infection control practices are likely to occur, while the high percentage of MDR TB notified among retreatment cases is probably the result of sub-optimal case management in the past decade.