Foreword to the 9th Edition of THE TBE BOOK:
A comprehensive guide to Tick-Borne Encephalitis
Tick-Borne Encephalitis (TBE):
A serious disease transmitted by ticks
The updates in this ninth edition focus primarily on the most current case numbers for tick‑borne encephalitis (TBE), incorporating surveillance data reported up to 2025. We are deeply grateful to our country authors, who have again supported this project with the best available epidemiologic information from their settings. Notably, more countries are now classified as “TBE endemic” under the ECDC framework for arbovirus epidemiology, with Belgium among the more recent additions.
A familiar pattern continues to shape these reports: limited awareness of TBE and substantial under-testing. Some countries still lack routine diagnostic capacity for TBE, and true TBE cases may be reported under other labels—such as “Japanese encephalitis” or “West Nile encephalitis” in regions where TBEV, JEV, or WNV circulate—because of antigenic cross‑reactivity and incomplete virologic work‑up. All TBE cases mentioned in The TBE BOOK are “reported cases” with unknown test intensity and no defined denominator. As always, we hope this edition will help travelers, clinicians, public health professionals, and policymakers to see these blind spots more clearly and to address them more systematically.
We would also like to extend our sincere thanks to Global Health Press for their continued commitment to publishing The TBE Book and for their long‑standing support in keeping this resource freely accessible to the TBE community worldwide.
Gerhard Dobler, Michael Bröker, Lidia Chitima-Dobler, Willi Erber, Joe Schmitt
June 2026
The Editors
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Published online on June 01, 2026
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