Norway intends to participate in European efforts to improve disease prevention. On Friday, June 14, it joined the eHealth network, which provides secure and authorised cross-border access to national and regional DNA and other health data base.
Twenty Member States are already participating in this network based on the European ‘declaration for delivering cross-border access to genomic database’, which aims to make one million genomes accessible at European level by 2022 (see EUROPE 11999/5). They are Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
In particular, the declaration supports three objectives: - to bring together fragmented infrastructure and expertise; - to exploit and optimise investments already made by Member States at national and European level, in particular in sequencing, biobanking and data infrastructure; - to achieve a larger base that will provide a sufficient scale for new clinically relevant research. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)