Burden of communicable diseases
European Union Member States face the challenge of how to best allocate limited resources in healthcare protection and disease prevention to achieve maximum results. Providing sound evidence improves the quality of health policy decision-making and promotes transparency and accountability. Measurement of the burden of disease provides evidence which can be taken into account in formulating health-related policies.
The Burden of Communicable Diseases in Europe (BCoDE) is an ECDC project that aims to estimate the burden of communicable diseases applying composite health measures (DALYs: Disability Adjusted Life Years) to summarize the overall burden in one single metric and compare the relative burden of each communicable disease.
A stand-alone software application, the BCoDE toolkit, allowing the estimation of DALYs for 32 communicable diseases and six healthcare-associated infections surveyed by ECDC is available for download.