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Acute gastrointestinal illness (AGI) is an important public health issue, with many pathogen sources and modes of transmission. A one-year telephone survey was conducted in Canada (2014-2015) to estimate the incidence of self-reported AGI in the previous 28 days and to describe health care seeking behaviour, using a symptom-based case definition. Excluding cases with respiratory symptoms, it is estimated that there are 0.57 self-reported AGI episodes per person-year, almost 19.5 million episodes in Canada each year. The proportion of cases seeking medical care was nearly 9%, of which 17% reported being requested to submit a sample for laboratory testing, and 49% of those requested complied and provided a sample. Results can be used to inform burden of illness and source attribution studies and indicate that AGI continues to be an important public health issue in Canada.

OBJECTIVE: To estimate the annual number of cases of illness due to verotoxigenic Escherichia coli (VTEC), Salmonella and Campylobacter in the Canadian population, using data from the National Notifiable Disease registry (NND), estimates of under-reporting derived from several National Studies on Acute Gastrointestinal Illness, and the literature.