ECDC on air.

The podcast of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

Keeping up to date with European Epidemiology.

Hello, welcome and thanks for tuning in to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control audio Series, ECDC on air.

I'm your host Lee, recording from our headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden.

On today's episode, we speak with Erica Duffel, principal expert in hepatitis,

and we discuss the ongoing hepatitis outbreak of unknown etiology in children.

Erica explains what hepatitis is, what's unusual about the current outbreak,

and what signs parents should look out for. We're joined today by Erica Duffel, principal expert in hepatitis here at ECDC.

Welcome, Erica. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

Before we get into your role here at ECDC, could you tell us a little bit about your background

and how you came to ECDC?

So I'm a medical doctor by training. I specialised in public health in the UK where we have a formal training program that lasts five years.

And during that training program, I sub-specialised in communicable disease control.

I then worked for several years in the northwest of England as a consultant in communicable disease control. I then worked for several years in the northwest of England as a consultant

in communicable disease control, covering a sort of fairly large population of a few million.

And this is a very busy job and much of my time was taken up, responding to outbreaks in the

hospital and community, sort of everything from Salmonella to tuberculosis.

And it's during this job that I became interested in hepatitis.

So I took on a lead role to develop and roll out a local strategy around hepatitis.

For me, it covers everything I feel strongly about in the work that I do.

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