[The microbiology department].

From the outset, the Department of Microbiology of Erasme Hospital has striven to offer to clinical teams a full range of high performance tests for diagnosis and therapeutic monitoring of bacterial, viral, fungal and parasitic infections, including opportunistic infections. Furthermore, the laboratory has developed and made available cutting edge tools for the epidemiologic surveillance and outbreak investigation in support to the hospital infection control and antibiotic resistance control programmes. Research and development programmes have led to technological innovation in the fields of molecular virologic diagnosis, notably for HIV and herpes viruses, rapid bacterial identification, detection of resistance genes and epidemiological typing. Research in collaboration with clinical teams has focused on congenital infections, HIV infection, opportunistic infections and prevention of nosocomial infection. The Department acts as national reference laboratory for a number of infectious diseases and co-ordinates or actively participates to several European multicentre studies and epidemiologic surveillance networks.