Recital 29

(29) The EWRS, a system enabling the notification at Union level of alerts related to serious cross-border threats to health, has been put in place by Decision No 1082/2013/EU in order to ensure that competent public health authorities in Member States and the Commission are duly informed in a timely manner. All serious cross-border threats to health covered by this Regulation are covered by the EWRS. In order to foster the effectiveness of alert systems for cross-border threats to health, the Commission should be encouraged to integrate information in an automatic manner from different important databases, such as those comprising environmental data, climate data, water irrigation data and other data relevant to serious cross-border threats to health, which could facilitate understanding and mitigate the risk of potential health threats. The operation of the EWRS should remain within the remit of the ECDC. The notification of an alert should be required only where the scale and severity of the threat concerned are or could become so significant that they affect or could affect more than one Member State and require or could require a coordinated response at Union level. The EWRS should be further developed and improved to augment the automation of information collection and analysis, reduce the administrative burden and improve the standardisation of the notifications. To avoid duplication and ensure coordination across Union alert systems, the Commission and the ECDC should ensure that alert notifications under the EWRS and other rapid alert systems at Union level are interoperable and, subject to human oversight, automatically linked to each other to the extent possible so that the competent authorities of the Member States can avoid as much as possible notifying the same alert through different systems at Union level and can benefit from receiving all-hazard alerts from a single coordinated source. Those national authorities should notify the relevant serious cross-border threats to health events in the EWRS. It allows simultaneous notification to be provided to the WHO of events that may constitute public health emergencies of international concern in accordance with Article 6 of the IHR.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-11-06 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.