Prevention and assessment of infectious diseases among children and adult migrants arriving to the European Union/European Economic Association: a protocol for a suite of systematic reviews for public health and health systems.
posted on 2017-11-27, 16:41authored byKevin Pottie, Alain D. Mayhew, Rachael L. Morton, Christina Greenaway, Elie A. Akl, Prinon Rahman, Dominik Zenner, Manish Pareek, Peter Tugwell, Vivian Welch, Joerg Meerpohl, Pablo Alonso-Coello, Charles Hui, Beverley-Ann Biggs, Ana Requena-Méndez, Eric Agbata, Teymur Noori, Holger J. Schünemann
INTRODUCTION: The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control is developing evidence-based guidance for voluntary screening, treatment and vaccine prevention of infectious diseases for newly arriving migrants to the European Union/European Economic Area. The objective of this systematic review protocol is to guide the identification, appraisal and synthesis of the best available evidence on prevention and assessment of the following priority infectious diseases: tuberculosis, HIV, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, poliomyelitis (polio), Haemophilus influenza disease, strongyloidiasis and schistosomiasis. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: The search strategy will identify evidence from existing systematic reviews and then update the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness evidence using prospective trials, economic evaluations and/or recently published systematic reviews. Interdisciplinary teams have designed logic models to help define study inclusion and exclusion criteria, guiding the search strategy and identifying relevant outcomes. We will assess the certainty of evidence using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: There are no ethical or safety issues. We anticipate disseminating the findings through open-access publications, conference abstracts and presentations. We plan to publish technical syntheses as GRADEpro evidence summaries and the systematic reviews as part of a special edition open-access publication on refugee health. We are following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses for Protocols reporting guideline. This protocol is registered in PROSPERO: CRD42016045798.
History
Citation
BMJ Open, 2017, 7:e014608
Author affiliation
/Organisation/COLLEGE OF LIFE SCIENCES/School of Medicine/Department of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation