[When should notification of an infectious disease be mandatory? A decision aid to determine whether mandatory...

In the Netherlands, all physicians are required to report cases of certain infectious diseases to the public health services, to allow appropriate control measures. In recent years, various requests have been submitted to add certain infectious diseases to the list of notifiable diseases. In order to decide whether such a request should be granted, we developed a structured decision aid based on a range of existing criteria for mandatory notification, applied in the Netherlands and other countries. In this article, we describe the development of this decision aid and illustrate its use in the mandatory notification application reviews for Vibrio vulnificus infection and tularaemia respectively. Based on the decision aid outcomes, mandatory notification for V. vulnificus infection was advised as not necessary whereas notification is considered mandatory for tularaemia.