| There is urgent need to monitor and control the alarming spread of antibiotic-resistant and pathogenic bacterial strains in European member states. Strains need to be characterised by common standards in order to detect and track their dissemination. The aim of the project is to create a network including leading European microbiology laboratories for data exchange on bacterial molecular characterisation("fingerprinting"), based on the only fully automated technology , rib typing. Standard procedures for data exchange and attribution of common codes to identical bacterial strains from different countries will be defined, and a common database with on-line access created. Broadened exploitation of this standard fingerprinting system will be ensured by developing comparable standards for manualribotyping procedures, and by assessment of data complementarily with other powerful fingerprinting methods and definition of type correspondence between methods. |