European Commission (EC)
The EC continues its work by hosting a one-day conference with security and crisis management stakeholders, gathering feedback by opening a public consultation on vaccines, and awarding a prize for maternal and newborn health projects.
Community of Users Meeting – Health session: “Preparedness and Response to Infectious Disease Threats”
- Date: Wednesday, March 7, 2018
- Location: Bouche-à-Oreille (BAO) Congress Centre, Rue Félix Hap 11, Brussels 1040, Belgium
The one-day conference will take place within the “10th Meeting of the Community of Users on Secure, Safe and Resilient Societies” on March 5-9, 2018 and is organized by the Directorate-General (DG) for Migration and Home Affairs. The meeting on March 7, 2018 will be held jointly by DG for Research and Innovation and DG for Health and Food Safety.
The “Community of Users on Secure, Safe and Resilient Societies” (CoU) is a platform of exchanges among different actors of different branches of security and crisis management. The CoU initiative came as a response to the complexity of the security and crisis management policy framework and the wide variety of research (FP7 and Horizon 2020 projects), capacity-building and training initiatives that led to a lack of awareness about policies and/or research project outputs by users, namely policy-makers, scientists, industry/SMEs and practitioners (e.g. civil protection units, medical emergency services and police departments).
Open Public Consultation on “Strengthened cooperation against vaccine preventable diseases”
In mid-2018, the Commission will adopt a proposal for a Council Recommendation on Strengthened Cooperation against Vaccine Preventable Diseases. The objective of this consultation is to collect the views of citizens and organisations with an interest in vaccination and health policy. The consultation is open until March 15, 2018.
The questionnaire is divided into three key areas:
- tackling vaccine hesitancy
- sustainable vaccine policies in the EU
- EU coordination, including the promotion of stakeholder dialogue and contribution to global health
Share your opinion and participate in the Open Consultation on Vaccines
Horizon Birth Day Prize
The ‘Birth Day’ Prize is an initiative of the European Commission, with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and MSD for Mothers (a Merck company), aiming to reduce death and illness of mothers and babies at birth.
At the award ceremony on February 13, 2018, the project QUARITE, developed by the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in France led by Professor Alexandre Dumont, was awarded the first prize and €1 million. The project used maternal death reviews (a new method of analysing and tracing the causes of maternal deaths) in hospitals in Senegal and Mali and managed to reduce maternal deaths in hospitals overall by 15%.
Two additional projects, CHAI MNH Nigeria and WOMAN-Trial, were awarded €1 million and €0.5 million respectively.
