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Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen (1841-1912) worked on leprosy throughout his career. Following his discovery of the leprosy bacillus in 1873, he proposed legislation that, when enacted in 1877 and 1885, established preventive measures aimed at isolating infectious patients. Around 1920, leprosy was more or less eradicated in Norway after a period of decline starting in 1850. Over this period, more than 8,000 cases were registered. Armauer Hansen's unique research achievement was based on a scientific and medical infrastructure in place long before he started his work. This context had several implications, though the discovery of the leprosy bacillus holds a particular fascination, with bearings on the interaction between medicine and the community even today.

It is a major clinical and public health problem that there is no clear strategy as to how we best make use of information obtained when pregnant women take drugs. For this reason, some pregnant women are not treated as they should be and some are given drugs they should not use. We suggest a monitoring system that combines some of the available datasets in Europe. Using these sources as a starting point, one can develop a system that has sufficient power to detect even rare diseases like congenital malformations and sufficient diversity to detect several possible outcomes from spontaneous abortions to childhood disorders. We also suggest that case-crossover designs should be used in case-control monitoring systems that carry a high risk of recall bias. These considerations are based upon our results from a European Union-funded concerted action called EuroMaP (Medicine and Pregnancy).