Estimating the burden of care home gastroenteritis outbreaks in England, 2014-2016.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Outbreaks of infectious gastroenteritis in care homes are common, with norovirus a frequent cause. In England there is no co-ordinated national surveillance system. We aimed to estimate the burden of these outbreaks.

Methods

Using a generalised linear mixed effects regression model we described the relationship between the observed number of care home outbreaks and covariates. Estimated model parameters were used to infer uplift in the number of outbreaks expected if all areas were subjected to enhanced surveillance. From this we then estimated the total burden of care home gastroenteritis outbreaks in this period.

Results

We estimated a total of 14,146 care home gastroenteritis outbreaks in England during 2014-2016; this is 47% higher than the reported tot

SUBMITTER: Inns T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6321657 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature