Vaccine preventable diseases: a regional surveillance can help improve data comparability between countries.

The way that surveillance of a given disease is undertaken in European countries varies greatly. Each study that has been undertaken on this subject so far has come to this conclusion, the variation between countries being related to many factors among which the organisation of the health care delivery plays a major role. This rule applies to vaccine preventable diseases and vaccine coverage surveillance as this Eurosurveillance issue shows. However, as the surveys undertaken for measles and pertussis indicate, there is a lot of common information gathered by each EU member state for both diseases. Therefore the definition of a minimal data set of pertinent variables common to most countries may be defined and is a way to initiate common EU data base. Whether this will be enough to effectively monitor timeliness and to compare the incidence in countries with different immunisation strategies and coverage needs to be further evaluated.