The Department of Infectious Diseases is a supra-regional facility that provides outpatient and inpatient care, including intensive care, to patients with infectious diseases from the Hradec Králové Region and to patients with selected infections from neighbouring regions. The department provides clients with modern health care in accordance with current scientific knowledge, provides undergraduate and postgraduate education, including the development of scientific activities. Particular attention is paid to the risk arising from the changing spectrum of infectious diseases and the rational use of antibiotic treatment. The clinic has long-established specialized clinics: liver, CNS infections, zoonoses, parasitic diseases, Lyme borreliosis. An AIDS centre and a vaccination and travel medicine centre are operated at the department. These centres and the long-term follow-up of patients with selected diagnoses have a supra-regional scope. The clinic is involved in international multicentre studies.

The department has long been involved in research topics (grants and scientific studies) in the field of effectiveness, safety and tolerability of treatment of chronic viral hepatitis B and C, in th field of therapy of the flu and on the field of vaccination.

Main research topics

• Open label phase 2 study to assess the safety, tolerability and efficacy of chronic viral hepatitis B treatment, OCTOPUS-1

• Multiclinical grant AZV 9302: Clinical phenotype of Sars-CoV-2 vaccinated persons hospitalized for COVID-19 disease as a basis for optimization of national vaccination strategy and post-exposure prophylaxis

Research groups

The research team is mainly involved in international studies, foreign and domestic grants. It is staffed by a fully certified medical platform and NLP.

• The most stable group (3 physicians and the corresponding NLP) is the research team, which has been working in the field of viral hepatitis treatment research for a long time

• Ad hoc teams are formed to address other current research needs, currently mainly in the area of covid-19

Achievements

• Publication output from ECDC grant in Euro Surveillance: Merdrignac L, Belghiti FA, Pandolfi E, Jané M, Murphy J, Fabianova K, et al. Incidence and severity of pertussis hospitalisations in infants aged less than one year in thirty-seven hospitals of six EU/EEA countries, results of PERTINENT sentinel pilot surveillance system, December 2015-December 2018. Euro Surveill.2020

• Publication output in Q1 journal: Céline Boutry, Andrew Hastie, Javier Diez-Domingo, Juan Carlos Tinoco et al.: Zoster-049 Study Group, The Adjuvanted Recombinant Zoster Vaccine Confers Long-Term Protection Against Herpes Zoster: Interim Results of an Extension Study of the Pivotal Phase 3 Clinical Trials ZOE-50 and ZOE-70, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Volume 74, Issue 8, 15 April 2022, Pages 1459–1467, https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciab629