A new approach to estimating trends in chlamydia incidence

Abstract

Objectives Directly measuring disease incidence in a population is difficult and not feasible to do routinely. We describe the development and application of a new method for estimating at a population level the number of incident genital chlamydia infections, and the corresponding incidence rates, by age and sex using routine surveillance data. Methods A Bayesian statistical approach was developed to calibrate the parameters of a decisionpathway tree against national data on numbers of notifications and tests conducted (2001-2013). Independent beta probability density functions were adopted for priors on the time-independent parameters; the shapes of these beta parameters were chosen to mat..