The work on evidence synthesis carried out by Daniela De Angelis and her team has contributed to the improvement of health care and overall public health by directly influencing policy in the area of HIV research. Their novel Multi-Parameter Evidence Synthesis (MPES) approach to estimating the HIV burden (De Angelis et al., 2014) has been, and continues to be, the chosen method to obtain UK official annual estimates of the number of individuals living with HIV, particularly the number of those unaware of their infection (Kirwan et al., 2016).
Estimates of undiagnosed HIV infections have underpinned public initiatives to encourage HIV testing: the “Halve It” campaign, which aims to halve the proportion of undiagnosed infections by 2020; the Terence Higgins’ Trust “It Starts with Me” campaign; and the recent National HIV prevention Programme for England, all rely on the information provided by Dr De Angelis and her colleagues. The MPES framework has also been used by European organisations to estimate HIV burden in other countries, such as the Netherlands and Poland in collaboration with BSU (Conti et al, 2011; Rosinska et al., 2016). Similarly to HIV, the MPES approach has been used to quantify flu severity, both in the UK and the USA (Presanis et al., 2014) and to produce estimates of Hepatitis C prevalence (Harris et al., 2012; Prevost et al., 2015), which also represent the official UK estimates.
School of Clinical Medicine, University of Cambridge
Read more at: http://www.iph.cam.ac.uk/public-health-policy/case-studies/hivstatistics/)