European Paediatric Influenza Analysis (EPIA) Group Formed To Quantify The Burden Of Seasonal Influenza In Children In Europe

Main Category: Flu / Cold / SARS
Also Included In: Pediatrics / Children's Health;  Immune System / Vaccines
Article Date: 21 May 2009 - 1:00 PDT

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The Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research (NIVEL) and SDI, a U.S. private-sector healthcare information company, announced the formation of the European Paediatric Influenza Analysis (EPIA) group, created to generate data needed to inform the decision process about paediatric influenza vaccination policy in individual European countries. Researchers from Denmark, England, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Scotland, Spain and Wales are participating; it is hoped that other countries will also join. EPIA was formed to address knowledge gaps highlighted in a recent European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) report that concluded that a key barrier to decision-making about paediatric flu vaccines is the lack of high-quality, European-specific data on disease burden, especially for young children. It is estimated by ECDC that at least 40,000 people die each year from influenza in the European Union (EU). EPIA will present the initial results from their research project at the 27th annual meeting of the European Society for Paediatric Infectious Diseases (ESPID) in June.

In the 2006 European Journal of Pediatrics article, "Should healthy children be vaccinated against influenza?", Dr. Terho Heikkinen and colleagues noted, "In many European and other countries, the discussion about potential expansion of target groups for annual influenza vaccination has just started....the development of new vaccination strategies in any country will require careful evaluation of the benefits and disadvantages of the intervention with respect to local factors."

EPIA will initially look at the burden of influenza- morbidity and mortality in children-using laboratory and influenza-like illness surveillance data collected by the European Influenza Surveillance Scheme (EISS) network between 1996 and May of 2008. The EPIA project will seek to identify and collect national and regional health data from multiple sources, including outpatient visits, emergency department visits, hospitalizations, deaths, antibiotic use, and additional healthcare utilization. The EPIA collaborators plan to use mathematical modeling strategies to quantify the proportions of such indicators that can be attributed to influenza epidemics. The modeling approach will be shared amongst the members and discussion of the findings as they continue to accumulate will be published.

The EPIA collaboration is expected to yield multi-country publications with multiple network authors, as well as country-based publications led by participating investigators in each country.

EPIA is funded by MedImmune, LLC, the wholly owned biologics business for AstraZeneca PLC. MedImmune is sponsoring this project to enable researchers from varied backgrounds to gather and analyze health outcomes data to support paediatric influenza policy decisions by European countries. The initial study concept was proposed by Lone Simonsen of SDI and George Washington University.

EPIA's data analysis and modeling group will be led by Lone Simonsen, Ph.D, and includes Richard Pitman, Ph.D., a senior health economist and an expert in disease burden modeling of time series data, affiliated with Oxford Outcomes in the UK. Dr. Simonsen has conducted her research at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and National Institutes of Health (NIH). Now a professor at George Washington University and a consultant for SDI, her research is focused on patterns and burden of influenza and studies of vaccine benefits.

The EPIA research project will operate from NIVEL where the project's European Project Leader, John Paget, Ph.D., also resides. Dr. Paget was instrumental in the coordination of EISS from 2000 to 2008, a period when the surveillance network grew from 7 countries at inception to a total of 35 countries (including all 27 Member States represented in the EU), and has published widely on the surveillance and epidemiology of influenza activity in Europe.

An independent academic Steering Committee will guide EPIA and will help coordinate the multinational analysis efforts. The Steering Committee consists of influenza researchers, paediatricians, epidemiologists and virologists from various member states. The committee includes: Terho Heikkinen, M.D., Ph.D., Caterina Rizzo, M.D., Derek Smith, Ph.D., Catherine Weil-Olivier, M.D., and Maria Zambon, Ph.D. Additionally, a representative from ECDC also attends the Steering Committee meetings. Dr. Heikkinen is a senior clinical researcher and specialist in paediatric infectious diseases at Turku University Hospital in Turku, Finland. Dr. Rizzo is a physician with the National Centre of Epidemiology and Health Promotion, Instuto Superiore de Santiá, in Rome, Italy. Dr. Smith is a professor of Infectious Disease Informatics at the University of Cambridge and the vice-president of the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza (ESWI). Dr. Weil-Olivier is a paediatrician and professor at Paris Diderot University, Université Paris - VII, in Paris, France. Dr. Zambon is the Director of the Centre for Infections, Health Protection Agency (HPA) in London, England.

EPIA will reside at NIVEL; for more information, visit http://www.nivel.eu/epia/.

Source
Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research

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