Epidemiological situation of rickettsioses in EU/EFTA countries.

When the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) published a call for tender to produce this guidance, I contacted several experts in the different networks and we decided to apply together. For the first time I was leading an international collaborative project of this size. We developed a survey on existing surveillance systems for tick-borne rickettsioses, and asked countries to provide surveillance data. We found out that data on rickettsioses were quite sparse, probably reflecting insufficient surveillance. Anyway this was a useful overview for countries and European institutions.