Third Study of Infectious Intestinal Disease in the UK (IID3 Study)

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  The third study of infectious intestinal disease in the community - determining illness burden and re-calibrating national surveillance systems in the United Kingdom

• IRAS ID

  314268

• Contact name

  Sarah O'Brien

• Contact email

  sarah.o'brien2@newcastle.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  Newcastle University

• Duration of Study in the UK

  3 years, 4 months, 30 days

• Research summary

  Infectious intestinal disease (IID), usually presenting as diarrhoea and vomiting (D&V), is frequently preventable. Though often mild and self-limiting, the fact that it is so common makes IID an important public health problem. In the mid 1990s around 1 in 5 people in England experienced IID in a year, costing around £0.75 billion. The economic impact comprised costs to the cases themselves, to the NHS and to employers in terms of time off work when sick, or time off work looking after someone who was sick. By the late 2000s IID across the UK had increased, affecting around 1 in 4 people. The estimated cost to the nation had also risen to approximately £9 billion. The IID1 Study (performed 1993-1996) and the IID2 Study (2008-2009) also helped us to understand the inaccuracies in national surveillance data. Now we want to measure IID burden again, to find out whether controls introduced by the Food Standards Agency have worked. We also want to re-calibrate national surveillance data. The Third Study of Infectious Intestinal Disease in the Community (IID3 Study), like its predecessors, comprises separate but related studies. We will estimate community IID rates in a prospective, all-age, population-based cohort study with weekly follow-up over a calendar year. We will also perform a prospective study of people presenting to their General Practice with IID symptoms. We will request faecal samples from all cases and test them for a very wide range of germs (pathogens), including markers of antimicrobial resistance, using modern molecular methods. We will also audit routine clinical and laboratory practice in primary care. We will calculate rates of IID overall, and pathogen-specific rates, in the community and presenting to Primary Care and compare the results with the previous studies. Finally, we will combine all our results to re-calibrate national surveillance data.

• REC name

  East Midlands - Nottingham 1 Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  22/EM/0130

• Date of REC Opinion

  10 Aug 2022

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion