New and virulent diseases pose significant future business continuity threats; a new ANTIGONE project will focus on ways to prevent future epidemics and deal with such outbreaks.

New and virulent diseases pose significant future business continuity threats. The SARS outbreak in 2003 showed the potential of such threats and the recent new Escherichia coli (E.coli) variant, which infected close to 4,000 people in Europe and killed 46, has encouraged the European Union to provide significant research funding into ways to prevent future epidemics and deal with such novel disease outbreaks.

The European Commission has decided to allocate an additional €12 million from the EU's Research Framework Programme to reinforce Europe's capacity for tackling pathogens.

This autumn, a cross-border consortium called ANTIGONE will start work on research aimed at getting as full a scientific picture as possible of the new E. coli strain – to which approximately €2.1 million will be specifically dedicated - and of a range of other virulent pathogens that could pose a threat to human health.

By better understanding these pathogens, scientists can go on to develop ways to tackle them.

ANTIGONE – ‘ANTIcipating the Global Onset of Novel Epidemics’, is currently scheduled to involve 14 partners from seven countries. The project will gather specific expertise on a broad range of viruses and bacteria, including Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC).

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