European Environment and Epidemiology (E3) Network
To strengthen the capacity to promote the E3 concept, ECDC is implementing an information resource hub designed to provide timely access to eco-climatic determinants, vector distribution, and infectious disease incidence data that are collected by a variety of sources. x
The data hub will serve as a reference point for supporting data exchanges and scientific collaborations between member states, researchers, and other authorised users across geographical and political boundaries in the European Community, with particular interest in the area of climatic change adaptation and emerging disease threats.
The E3 resource base will promote Europe-wide quality standards for environmental data by leveraging knowledge resources, and it will enrich and increase the usage and availability of feature-rich datasets and outputs of scientific analysis in the focus area of climate change adaptation and public health impacts.
The overarching objective of establishing the E3 network is to permit Europe-wide analyses of the impending risks to infectious disease spread due to environmental change. The result of these analyses then will be disseminated to policy makers, public health practitioners, European Union and international agencies, other governmental sectors, and non-governmental organisations.
The E3 Geoportal was built in collaboration with the EDEN project Integrated Project of the 6th FP funded by the European Commission under the Research DG (Emerging Diseases in a changing European eNvironment, CORDIS webpage and Project website), which aimed to identify and catalogue European ecosystems and environmental conditions which can influence the spread of infectious disease. The EDEN project developed a wide range of geospatial data that was hosted by the EDEN data repository. In recognition of the high value of this data to the European research community, ECDC decided to continue to host all of this data once the EDEN project was completed.
Today, ECDC continues to collaborate with the EU research project, which focuses on the biology and control of vector-borne infections in Europe EDENext (CORDIS webpage and Project website).
More generally, the E3 network is working to continue to promote the exchange of knowledge and expertise from across Europe, in line with the ECDC mission to identify, assess and communicate current and emerging threats to human health posed by infectious diseases (ECDC mission).