Estimating the prevalence of infectious diseases from under-reported age-dependent compulsorily notification databases

• Autor(a) principal: Amaku, Marcos
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Outros Autores: Burattini, Marcelo Nascimento [UNIFESP], Chaib, Eleazar, Bezerra Coutinho, Francisco Antonio, Greenhalgh, David, Lopez, Luis Fernandez, Massad, Eduardo
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UNIFESP
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio.unifesp.br/handle/11600/54002; http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12976-017-0069-2
• topic: Hepatitis C; Mathematical models; Notifications system incidence; Prevalence

Background: National or local laws, norms or regulations (sometimes and in some countries) require medical providers to report notifiable diseases to public health authorities. Reporting, however, is almost always incomplete. This is due to a variety of reasons, ranging from not recognizing the diseased to failures in the technical or administrative steps leading to the final official register in the disease notification system. The reported fraction varies from 9 to 99% and is strongly associated with the disease being reported. Methods: In this paper we propose a method to approximately estimate the full prevalence (and any other variable or parameter related to transmission intensity) of infectious diseases. The model assumes incomplete notification of incidence and allows the estimation of the non-notified number of infections and it is illustrated by the case of hepatitis C in Brazil. The method has the advantage that it can be corrected iteratively by comparing its findings with empirical results. Results: The application of the model for the case of hepatitis C in Brazil resulted in a prevalence of notified cases that varied between 163,902 and 169,382 cases