News Release

Better methods and estimates of infectious disease burden

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

Better estimates of infectious disease burden are needed for effective planning and prioritizing of limited public health resources. These are the conclusions of a new Policy Forum article in this week's PLoS Medicine, in which Mirjam Kretzschmar from the Centre for Infectious Disease Control, RIVM in Bilthoven, The Netherlands and colleagues describe the Burden of Communicable Diseases in Europe (BCoDE) study that uses a pathogen-based incidence approach to generate infectious disease burden estimates in Europe taking into full account all chronic and long-term sequelae that can be causally related to an infectious agent. The authors found that this methodology has the advantage of consistently attributing the burden to its infectious cause. Although the approach also has some limitations—for example, many pathogens cause broad, nonspecific disease syndromes and it is difficult to attribute morbidity to a specific pathogen.

The researchers say that the study's findings show the need for further research in this area and that future challenges include the integration of demographic changes and infection dynamics into the methodology for estimating the burden of IDs.

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Funding: The study was funded by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (Specific agreement No 1 to Framework Partnership Agreement GRANT/2008/003). The funders are also participating in the research project and are co-authors of the paper.

Competing Interests: MJM received funding for a related tender by ECDC. AH and EF are members of the World Health Organization's Foodborne Disease Burden Epidemiology Reference Group (FERG). AC and PK are employed by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC, http://www.ecdc.europa.eu) and ECDC provided a grant which co-funded this study.

Citation: Kretzschmar M, Mangen M-JJ, Pinheiro P, Jahn B, Fe`vre EM, et al. (2012) New Methodology for Estimating the Burden of Infectious Diseases in Europe. PLoS Med 9(4): e1001205. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001205

CONTACT:

Mirjam Kretzschmar
The National Institute for Public Health and the Environment
Centre for Infectious Disease Control
PO Box 1
Bilthoven, 3720 BA
NETHERLANDS
+31 30 2744020
m.e.e.kretzschmar@umcutrecht.nl

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