Investigators accessed longitudinal human data from ebola virus vaccination for signals of efficacy against the Bundibugyo species now surging in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
|Articles|January 30, 2017
New Tool Estimates Burden of Infectious Diseases
The ECDC has released a software toolkit that can calculate the disability-adjusted life years for a number of infectious diseases and healthcare-associated infections.
Advertisement
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) has launched a new, user-friendly, software toolkit to facilitate calculation of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for a variety of infectious diseases and healthcare-associated infections. The characteristics of this toolkit were recently published
“European Union member states face the challenge of how to best allocate limited resources in health protection and disease prevention to achieve maximum results,” Dr. Edoardo Colzani, from the ECDC, Solna, Sweden, told Contagion ®. “Providing sound evidence improves the quality of decision-making in health policy and promotes transparency and accountability. Measurement of the burden of disease provides such evidence.”
According to Dr. Colzani, the Burden of Communicable Diseases in Europe (BCoDE) is an ECDC project that aims to estimate the burden of communicable diseases by applying composite health measures—DALYs—to summarize the overall burden of both morbidity and mortality in a single metric.
To meet this goal, the BCoDE toolkit was developed as an open-access software application that may be used by interested professionals from academia and European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA) national health institute. The software will allow experts from within and outside the EU/EEA to estimate the burden of communicable diseases, compare the relative burden of each communicable disease, and to introduce use of DALYs in their epidemiological research.
In their publication, Dr. Colzani and colleagues stress that use and interpretation of DALY estimates can be difficult, due to both the complexity of a composite health indicator and the underlying assumptions made. Computational calculation of DALYs is also intensive and time consuming in that it involves multiple complex tools, such as spreadsheets and macros, as well as add-on software.
The BCoDE toolkit helps to overcome these challenges. It is a user-friendly, standalone application that enables the calculation of DALYs by entering age- and sex-specific incidence data for 32 infectious diseases and 6 healthcare-associated infections, with each disease model containing default parameters that the user can edit as necessary.
The application is designed for use by public health professionals who may be unfamiliar with the burden of disease methodology, and to allow them to more effectively rank infectious diseases in terms of disease burden within and across different populations.
“It is written in C++,” said Dr. Colzani. “It offers multiple visualization options for summarizing complex epidemiological data, and it is open-access and freely available for download from the ECDC website.” ECDC will also publish future software updates on their website, he added.
Dr. Colzani also stressed that, if funding is available, ECD plans to perform regular literature reviews on all disease models and parameters, to keep the default disease models in the software up-to-date. They also plan to improve the application to allow the user to create novel outcomes trees for new disease and conditions (including boxes and sub-boxes for health outcomes and states, and arrows for transitional probabilities). In addition, they aim to create an open access library where users can share new disease models.
“ECDC is looking forward to receiving feedback on the implementation of the toolkit,” Dr. Colzani concludes.
Advertisement
Related to this article
In the first episode of our news series looking at the food safety network, Lynette Johnston, PhD, offers insights into how the federal government surveillance infrastructure operates, and how epidemiologists serve as food detectives in determining bacterial pathogens and potential foodborne outbreaks.
In mid-May, as the world was still grappling with an unexpected hantavirus outbreak aboard a tourism vessel, news broke of an Ebola outbreak in the Ituri Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo spanning at least 3 health zones, including Bunia, Rwampara, and Mongbwalu.
In this week's top infectious disease stories, a Pennsylvania teen became the state's fourth measles death in weeks, the CDC reported a 17% summer surge in rabies exposure calls, new research revisited whether cefepime raises mortality risk, a multihospital review examined ceftriaxone's safety after state alerts, and examining Legionella pneumonia diagnostics.
The latest CDC numbers show a 5.37% increase of measles cases from week-to-week. In Pennsylvania, the fourth measles-related death was reported in 2026. Additionally, the CDC has made a change in the way it will report deaths.
A "Clinician Outreach" from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in April anticipated an increase in rabies exposures, and the striking surge in case reports this summer prompted a recent health advisory alert from the federal agency.
Reported cases of Legionnaires’ disease have been on the rise for the past decade, and identifying Legionella bacteria requires specialized testing in the microbiology lab. Here is a clinical overview of Legionella bacteria, including required testing, treatment, and reporting to public health officials.
A retrospective multihospital study found that severe adverse events occurred at similarly low rates with ceftriaxone and other IV cephalosporins suggesting there is no evidence to support avoiding ceftriaxone despite recent health department safety alerts.