Travellers returning to Sweden as sentinels for comparative disease incidence in other European countries, campylobacter and giardia infection as examples.

Comparable figures on disease incidence between countries are difficult to attain. We therefore compared risk of infection for Swedes going to other European countries. We took as the numerator the number of imported cases from European countries of campylobacter and giardia infection in the national Swedish surveillance database, and as the denominator, the number of visitors to each country from a commercial database on foreign travel. Risk of infection in tourists was also compared to national incidence figures for a selection of countries.