Negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council of the EU reached an agreement on the evening of Monday 29 November on the revision of the mandate of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).
“We take one step closer to a stronger European Health Union!”, the European Commission said on Tuesday morning (see EUROPE 12600/24). The text negotiated on Monday is the second of three new regulations on EU health crisis management to be the subject of a draft interinstitutional agreement (see EUROPE 12822/1).
Once it enters into force, it will give the ECDC enhanced capacity to monitor, assess and thus anticipate transboundary health risks. It will also give the European Centre more scope to support Member States in the event of a crisis or to improve the monitoring of national health systems. It should also bring it more in line with the recommendations of the World Health Organization.
Missions. Under the new regulation, the ECDC will, among other things, organise visits to Member States to help prepare for health crises, monitor the capacity of national systems to respond to and recover from epidemics, and help national authorities develop their capacity to detect and sequence genomes and infectious agents.
The ECDC will also be responsible for setting up an EU Task Force, a group of experts who will support the response to a disease at local level and will work in coordination with the EU Civil Protection Mechanism.
Finally, the Centre will have new tasks in the area of data collection: the objective here will be to generate data that are more comparable than those currently provided by the States. The ECDC will therefore need to coordinate the harmonisation of data collection procedures, data validation, data analysis and data dissemination.
Non-communicable diseases. One of the main issues still to be decided was the European Parliament’s proposal to extend the scope of the text to non-communicable diseases - cardiovascular diseases, cancers, respiratory diseases, diabetes, and mental disorders.
The Parliament would have liked the Centre to be responsible for assessing the interconnection of infectious diseases with these non-communicable diseases and the impact of a health crisis on health systems in general.
However, the proposal - which had already caused a lot of debate in the Parliament itself - did not quite succeed. It was finally decided by the co-legislators not to refer to non-communicable diseases in the text, but to add a revision clause.
This clause foresees that by 2025, and every 5 years thereafter, the European Commission will order an independent external evaluation: the possibility of extending the Centre’s mandate to non-communicable diseases will then be assessed in this framework, an institutional source confirmed to EUROPE.
More broadly, the evaluation will aim to examine the Centre’s performance against its stated objectives.
The interim agreement on the new ECDC mandate still needs to be formally approved by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU before it is definitively adopted. (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)