For example, in a population survey in Wales, 8% of people self-reporting stomach disorder with diarrhea due to food reported contracting the disease while outside the UK.9 Follow-up of laboratory confirmed cases of campylobacteriosis in the UK showed that 20% of the cases had traveled abroad in 2 weeks prior to symptom onset.10 The proportion of human salmonellosis cases in Denmark attributed to travel was 46% in 2007 and 23% in 2008.11,12 In Sweden, 77% of the shigellosis and 78% of the salmonellosis cases between

1997 and 2003 were travel-related.13 In Canada, a review of the public health surveillance for TRC concluded that travel information was not systematically collected and reported by any surveillance system for gastrointestinal illness.14 A targeted study in 2000 reported that among 625 Canadians surveyed, JAK/stat pathway 55 reported having suffered from an acute gastrointestinal illness and 6 (11%)

of those had traveled abroad (eg, outside Canada) within 4 weeks prior to symptom onset.15 On an individual basis, several factors contribute to the risk of contracting a disease abroad, such as age, gender, vaccination Bleomycin order and chemoprophylaxis, travel duration, reason for travel, and conditions of travel (eg, type of accommodation).3,16,17 With regard to the reason for travel, several studies highlighted greater risk among those visiting friends and relatives, compared to travelers for tourism or leisure whereas other studies focused on new immigrants.18,19 Therefore, both the increase in Canadians traveling abroad20 and the continuing immigration from various parts of the world21 are expected to contribute significantly to the burden of illness due to enteropathogens in Canada,

the extent of which has not been precisely or recently estimated. This study aimed to describe TRC of illness caused by enteropathogens in a Canadian community, and more specifically Lck to estimate the burden of such TRC compared to the burden of DC, and to describe the characteristics of the travelers who contracted such illness while abroad. An underlying hypothesis was that subgroups of travelers exist in terms of risk of contracting infectious diseases outside Canada, namely new immigrants, short-term travelers, and long-term travelers. Data were obtained from the National Integrated Enteric Pathogen Surveillance program (C-EnterNet), a sentinel site surveillance system facilitated by the Public Health Agency of Canada operating in the Region of Waterloo (ROW), Ontario. Approximately 500,000 people reside in three cities and four rural townships in this area (http://maps.region.waterloo.on.ca/locator/locator.htm). The study period spanned from June 2005 to May 2009, inclusive.