Eurostat is the Statistical Office of the European Communities. It is situated in Luxembourg. Its task is to provide the European Union with statistics at European level that enable comparisons between countries and regions.

Eurostat was established in 1953 to meet the requirements of the Coal and Steel Community. Over the years its task has broadened and when the European Community was founded in 1958 it became a Directorate-General (DG) of the European Commission. Eurostat’s key role is to supply statistics to other DGs and supply the Commission and other European Institutions with data so they can define, implement and analyse Community policies.

Eurostat offers a whole range of data that can be used by governments, businesses, the education sector, journalists and the public.

Eurostat is the preferred data source for most indicators in the ECHI shortlist (e.g., the demographic and socio-economic indicators and disease-specific mortality indicators).

The data-type of Eurostat used by ECHI are:

• National population censuses and populations registers for demographic data
• Labour Force Survey for data on the labour market (e.g., for indicators such as “total unemployment”).
• EU-SILC survey for data on self-perceived health, chronic (longstanding) illnesses or conditions and limitation in activities due to health problems.
• European Health Interview Survey (EHIS). EHIS is a harmonized questionnaire, which contains many items from the ECHI shortlist. Among others, questions on physical limitations, diabetes prevalence, stroke, asthma, home and leisure accidents, smoking, alcohol consumption, drug use, influenza vaccination, breast cancer screening, number of outpatient contacts per person per year, visits to the dentist, are included in the EHIS questionnaire. The first round of EHIS took place in 2009 in a limited number of countries (results not published yet). The next round is planned for 2014.

For more information see Eurostat website.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), established in 2005, is an EU agency with aim to strengthen Europe's defenses against infectious diseases. ECDC identifies, assesses and communicates current and emerging threats to human health posed by infectious diseases. ECDC works in partnership with national health protection bodies across Europe to strengthen and develop continent-wide disease surveillance and early warning systems

ECDC serves as the preferred data source for the “incidence of selected communicable diseases” indicator in ECHI.

For more information see ECDC website.

EuroHIV has co-ordinated the surveillance of HIV/AIDS in the WHO European Region (53 countries) since 1984. Its mission is to understand, improve and share European HIV/AIDS surveillance data in order to better inform disease prevention, control and care. Its objectives include making international comparisons, assessing trends, characterizing affected populations and predicting disease burden and evaluating surveillance methods.

EuroHIV is the preferred data source for ECHI for the indicator “HIV/AIDS”.

For more information see EuroHIV website.

In cases in which there are no regular or adequate data available for indicators in the international databases, ECHI may identify European indicator projects as preferred (temporary) data source. Projects often gather data in a limited time frame and that limits drawing conclusions based on trends and long term changes. However, the recommendations of such projects are sometimes essential for future data collection, and in some cases these recommendations have been taken over by ECHI.

Examples of projects that have collected indicator data are PERISTAT (data on perinatal mortality), ESEMED/EPREMED (data on depression) and EUDIP/EUCID (data on diabetes).