National and sub-national burden of infectious diseases in Iran, 1990 to 2013: the study protocol

To assess the burden of infectious diseases, it is necessary to utilize a systematic approach for data collection and deploying the sophisticated methods to estimate the burden of infectious diseases for health policy making at national level. The present study protocol is aimed to provide a comprehensive explanation of the general structure and method used in the national and sub-national burden of selected infectious diseases study in Iran from 1990 to 2013.

The trend, burden, and geographical inequality pattern of infectious diseases will be estimated through a comprehensive review of published and unpublished data. Different sources of data including health surveys, surveillance data, hospital data surveys, death registry system, census, household expenditure survey, and published manuscripts will be synthesized to calculate the estimates. All indicators will be reported by gender, age, and geographic area. Two different statistical models include "Spatio-Temporal" and "Bayesian multilevel autoregressive" will be applied to overcome the scarcity and misalignment of the obtained data.

Estimating the prevalence trend and burden of infectious diseases would be helpful to use more cost-effective interventions considering sub-national variations. Additionally, the information obtained from these studies can depict the ability of health system authorities in controlling these types of diseases.  Overall, the present applied models can be deployed as a part of inputs in further studies to estimate the burden of diseases, not only in Iran but also all around the Middle East countries.