[Systematic Review of the Burden of Campylobacter-associated Disease]

Bacteria of the genus Campylobacter spp. are one of the most common causes of gastroenteritis and can lead to serious sequelae. Several studies have estimated the disease burden of Campylobacter spp. with the quantitative metric of disability-adjusted life years (DALY). The aim of this systematic review is to give an overview of the information available about different countries and periods for which DALYs were calculated and how the different results are comparable. One of the most important transmission pathways for Campylobacter spp. is food. Therefore, special attention was given to studies that only estimated the foodborne disease burden of Campylobacter bacteria. With a systematic search for the period 1/1996-6/2016, one worldwide and 21 country-specific publications of the WHO were identified. Because of the different methods and the quality of the different data sets, the estimated results of all Campylobacter health outcomes of the country-specific studies vary from 0.4 DALYs per 100000 people in France to 109 DALY per population in Poland. The calculation of the attributable foodborne disease burden was based on the estimations of the incidences of all Campylobacter health outcomes with the associated uncertainty for each result. So the estimations of the foodborne disease burden show a large range from 0.5 DALYs per 100000 people in Greek to 21.2 DALYs per 100000 people in New Zealand. This span can only be partially explained by the country-specific variability in the food production, the consumption behavior and the incidence of Campylobacter bacteria.