The daily updated Dutch national database on COVID-19 epidemiology, vaccination and sewage surveillance.

The Dutch national open database on COVID-19 has been incrementally expanded since its start on 30 April 2020 and now includes datasets on symptoms, tests performed, individual-level positive cases and deaths, cases and deaths among vulnerable populations, settings of transmission, hospital and ICU admissions, SARS-CoV-2 variants, viral loads in sewage, vaccinations and the effective reproduction number. This data is collected by municipal health services, laboratories, hospitals, sewage treatment plants, vaccination providers and citizens and is cleaned, analysed and published, mostly daily, by the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) in the Netherlands, using automated scripts. Because these datasets cover the key aspects of the pandemic and are available at detailed geographical level, they are essential to gain a thorough understanding of the past and current COVID-19 epidemiology in the Netherlands. Future purposes of these datasets include country-level comparative analysis on the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19 in different contexts, such as different cultural values or levels of socio-economic disparity, and studies on COVID-19 and weather factors.

An outbreak of listeriosis linked to turkey meat products in the Czech Republic, 2012-2016.

Since 2012-2016 an increased number of listeriosis cases, especially from one region of the Czech Republic, were observed. Most of them were caused by strains of serotype 1/2a, clonal complex 8, indistinguishable by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis. Twenty-six human cases were reported, including two neonatal cases in twins. Three cases were fatal. The typing of Listeria monocytogenes isolates from food enabled to confirm a turkey meat delicatessen as the vehicle of infection for this local outbreak in the Moravian-Silesian Region. The food strains belonging to identical pulsotype were isolated from ready-to-eat turkey meat products packaged by the same producer between 2012 and 2016. This fact confirms that the described L. monocytogenes outbreak strain probably persisted in the environment of the aforementioned food-processing plant over several years. Whole-genome sequencing confirmed a very close relationship (zero to seven different alleles) between isolates from humans, foods and swabs from the environment of the food-processing plant under investigation.