Edastuskiri

To: National EQA coordinators for the EARS-Net EQA, 2025
Cc: National Focal Points for AMR; National Coordinators of Coordinating Competent Bodies

Dear colleagues,

Thank you for your activities for the EARS-Net EQA, following your designation as the national contact for the 2025 EQA by your National Focal Point for AMR.

For your information:

ECDC will soon send a survey to the nationally-designated contacts in clinical laboratories that were invited to participated in EARS-Net EQAs in 2021–2024, in all 30 EU/EEA countries.  The survey will be distributed to each laboratory by the ECDC contractor for the EARS-Net EQAs in 2021-2024, i.e. the National Food Institute, Technical University of Denmark (DTU Food). 

Here is more information about the survey:

The survey is named the ‘ECDC EARS-Net survey of clinical laboratories regarding antimicrobial susceptibility testing of the WHO AWaRe Reserve antimicrobials for selected Gram-negative pathogens, 2025’ (EASTR (2025)). Its purpose is to gather information regarding these pathogen-antimicrobial combinations, to guide the appropriate use of EARS-Net AMR surveillance data for public health purposes, and, importantly, to map the limitations of these data.

EASTR (2025) collects information related to antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) methods for four pathogens (Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumonia, Acinetobacter species, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa) and six antibiotics from the Reserve group of the WHO AwaRe classification (2023). These six antibiotics were newly added, in 2024, to the ECDC EARS-Net AMR surveillance protocol (i.e. ceftazidime-avibactam, cefiderocol, ceftolozane-tazobactam, imipenem-relebactam and meropenem-vaborbactam) and/or to the EUCAST clinical breakpoints (i.e. aztreonam-avibactam, which had breakpoints published on 22 May 2024 and included in breakpoints table 15.0).

EASTR (2025) was developed as a collaboration between ECDC and DTU Food. The survey was discussed with national attendees of the EARS-Net Network meeting in June 2024 and at EARS-Net Disease Network Coordination Committee (DNCC) meetings in 2023–2025. In Q4 2024, the survey was piloted in 7 laboratories in 7 countries.

DTU Food will distribute the survey to laboratories, via a hyperlink in an email, using their EQA webtool. Following the national feedback received at the Network meeting, DTU Food has provided translations of the survey into European languages, including the 24 official EU languages, on its webpage (https://www.food.dtu.dk/english/topics/antimicrobial-resistance/ears-net). The pilot indicated that it should take about 60 minutes to complete the survey.

ECDC currently plans to present some key findings from EASTR (2025) in the ECDC Annual Epidemiological Report (AER) for AMR in 2025, because the previous and upcoming EARS-Net surveillance protocol permit reporting of a subset of these new antimicrobial data. Subsequently, ECDC plans to report on all EASTR (2025) data. If ECDC drafts a public output that includes national-level EASTR (2025) data, the standard practice is to send it to countries for comments prior to publication. Outputs will not present laboratory identifiers.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions ([email protected]), or you are welcome to contact DTU Food directly ([email protected]).

Thank you, in advance, for your interest in this topic area.

Hanna Merk, Pete Kinross (ECDC)
and Ana Rita Rebelo, Birgitte Helwigh (DTU Food)