The global burden of hepatitis E virus genotypes 1 and 2 in 2005

We estimated the global burden of hepatitis E virus (HEV) genotypes 1 and 2 in 2005. HEV is an emergent waterborne infection that causes source-originated epidemics of acute disease with a case fatality rate thought to vary by age and pregnancy status. To create our estimates, we modeled the annual disease burden of HEV genotypes 1 and 2 for 9 of 21 regions defined for the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (the GBD 2010 Study), which represent 71% of the world's population. We estimated the seroprevalence of anti-HEV antibody and annual incidence of infection for each region using data from 37 published national studies and the DISMOD 3, a generic disease model designed for the GBD Study. We converted incident infections into three mutually exclusive results of infection: (1) asymptomatic episodes, (2) symptomatic disease, and (3) death from HEV. We also estimated incremental cases of stillbirths among infected pregnant women. For 2005, we estimated 20.1 (95% credible interval [Cr.I.]: 2.8-37.0) million incident HEV infections across the nine GBD Regions, resulting in 3.4 (95% Cr.I.: 0.5-6.5) million symptomatic cases, 70,000 (95% Cr.I.: 12,400-132,732) deaths, and 3,000 (95% Cr.I.: 1,892-4,424) stillbirths. We estimated a probability of symptomatic illness given infection of 0.198 (95% Cr.I.: 0.167-0.229) and a probability of death given symptomatic illness of 0.019 (95% Cr.I.: 0.017-0.021) for nonpregnant cases and 0.198 (95% Cr.I.: 0.169-0.227) for pregnant cases.

The model was most sensitive to estimates of age-specific incidence of HEV disease.