Suchergebnisse

Background: Commitment to food safety is evidenced by high profile governmental initiatives around the globe. To measure progress towards targets, policy makers need to know the baseline from which they started.

Recent changes in the NHS have left many defects in the systems for the control of communicable diseases and infection and their surveillance and the management of outbreaks. Clear, explicit legislation is needed, placing the responsibilities on health authorities. New teams led by consultants need to be set up to investigate and manage outbreaks of communicable diseases of all types.

By building reconstruction models for a case of gastroenteritis in the general population moving through different steps of the surveillance pyramid we estimated that millions of illnesses occur annually in the European population, leading to thousands of hospitalizations. We used data on the healthcare system in seven European Union member states in relation to pathogen characteristics that influence healthcare seeking. Data on healthcare usage were obtained by harmonized cross-sectional surveys. The degree of under-diagnosis and underreporting varied by pathogen and country. Overall, underreporting and under-diagnosis were estimated to be lowest for Germany and Sweden, followed by Denmark, The Netherlands, UK, Italy and Poland. Across all countries, the incidence rate was highest for Campylobacter spp. and Salmonella spp. Incidence estimates resulting from the pyramid reconstruction approach are adjusted for biases due to different surveillance systems and are therefore a better basis for international comparisons than reported data.