Abstract
Composite health measures are increasingly applied in studies aiming at describing the burden of diseases, and food and water-borne diseases (FWDs) are no exception. The Burden of Communicable Diseases in Europe (BCoDE) is a project led and funded by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) with the purpose of encouraging and empowering public health experts in the estimation of the impact of communicable diseases expressed in Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs). Calculation of DALYs and a critical assessment of burden of disease outputs require a thorough consideration of a number of methodological and epidemiological decisions ranging from modelling (e.g. incidence versus prevalence), disease model parameters (e.g. risks of developing complications or death) and the data feeding the number of cases.Burden of disease studies produce useful results for public health decision-making, in particular when they aim at informing preventive strategies. For this purpose, we attributed FWDs results from the BCoDE 2015 study to different exposure routes. We discuss these in the more general perspective of generating burden of disease evidence for planning and prioritisation, including the potentials and limitations of its methodology.
Highlights
Determining the public health impact of food and water-borne diseases (FWDs) poses a number of challenges
Disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), a summary measure of population health developed by the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study [5], match these requirements and are increasingly utilised to inform evidence-based health policy decision making [6,7,8,9,10,11]
Funded by an European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) grant and implemented in collaboration with a European Consortium led by the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), the project included European experts from academic centres and national health institutes
Summary
Determining the public health impact of food and water-borne diseases (FWDs) poses a number of challenges Attempts to estimate such burden include reporting of infections [1,2,3], incidence and mortality [4]. In 2006, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) commissioned a pilot estimation of seven selected infectious diseases (IDs) in order to explore the interest in and feasibility of a burden of infectious disease study and to layout its methodology [12,13] Based on this pilot investigation, the Burden of Communicable Diseases in Europe (BCoDE) project was launched. We discuss how findings of burden of disease studies compare and how these are useful in providing scientifically sound information to risk managers and their decision making process
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