A toolkit for national dengue burden estimation
Across numerous disciplines and countries, a major hurdle in the prevention and control of dengue has been the urgent need for improved estimates of the burden of dengue.
This task is made more difficult by issues such as the large number of mild or asymptomatic infections, the heterogenous nature of dengue transmission, misdiagnosis of febrile illnesses, potentially long-term complications and side-effects, and the indirect costs to stretched health systems or of missed work and education.
To assist countries in improving accurate quantitative measurements of dengue, the World Health Organisation has recently launched a toolkit to guide countries on how to best estimate their current burden of dengue, by combining existing data from dengue surveillance systems with on-going research efforts to measure the community burden of dengue. This is part of an ongoing WHO Global Strategy for dengue prevention and control, 2012-2020.
The Toolkit for National Burden Estimation includes methodologies and suggested standards on collating and reporting dengue surveillance data, analysing febrile cohorts, the economic burden of dengue, factoring the spatial variation in burden, and much more.
Publication details Editors: WHO/Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases Number of pages: vi, 37 p. Publication date: December 2018 WHO reference number: WHO/CDS/NTD/VEM/2018.05
