On the 27-28.09.2017 in town of Hisaria, Bulgaria, was held second annual meeting of human and veterinarian experts on influenza preparedness within the project “Surveillance and Response To Avian And Pandemic Influenza”, funded by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), executed by “Southeast European Centre for Surveillance and Control of Infectious Diseases”.

Participants from different organizations admitted the meeting.

On 16 November 2017 a workshop took place in Tirana, Albania. This workshop was organized in collaboration with Robert Koch Institute and Department of Infectious Diseases in Institute of Public Health Albania, with the facilitation of South East European Center for Surveillance and Control of Infectious Diseases (SECID). The general aim of workshop was to present the new case definitions and to test them in the current Albanian situation.

In the framework of the fifth year implementation of the Project ‘Surveillance and response to avian and pandemic influenza’, funded by Center of Disease Control Prevention (CDC), on 9 October 2017, in Albania was organized a workshop to enhance and strengthen the surveillance of Influenza Like Illness (ILI) in Tirana. The workshop focused on the assessment of the influenza sentinel ILI centers for the last four influenza seasons.

In the framework of the “Activities on leishmanisis in Albania”, supported by WHO , during the period of 24 September – 14 October 2017 a specialist of the field from the Institute of Public Health, Tirana, Albania, conducted a training on PCR diagnosis of leishmaniasis. This training took place in Laboratory for Reference and Research in Parasitology at the National Centre for Microbiology, Instituto de Salud Carlos III, in Madrid, Spain under the supervision of Dr Carmen Chicharro and Dr Javier Moreno.