Disease burden can be weighted by disability adjusted life years (DALYs) estimations. DALYs are the sum of years of life lost (YLL) and years lived with disability (YLD). Estimation of the disease burden in DALYs requires data on mortality, morbidity, duration and severity for every possible health outcome of the infection. For parasitic infections estimation of the disease burden is often complicated by a lack of reliable data, as a result of under-diagnosis and the lack of monitoring programmes. So far, DALYs estimations for parasitic infections in the Netherlands are only available for toxoplasmosis, cryptosporidiosis and giardiasis. Nevertheless, it has been shown that the disease burden of congenital toxoplasmosis alone (around 620 DALYs per year) is similar to that of Salmonella spp. (670 DALYs per year) (Havelaar et al., 2007) while the disease burden for Giardia lamblia (364 DALYs) is comparable to those for rota- and corona-viruses. The disease burden of cryptosporidiosis is considerably lower (123 DALYs) (http://rivm.openrepository.com/rivm/bitstream/10029/ 16471/1/330081001.pdf). It should be noted that the information on the clinical presentation and the attribution for the calculation of DALY's in The Netherlands is still uncertain for all three parasites, nevertheless, these numbers demonstrate that parasitic infections are equally important to major food-borne bacterial and viral infections. Obviously, not all cases are related to food, as there are other routes of transmission. Unfortunately, the source of infection is rarely identified because of delays in diagnosis. Therefore, the attribution of the different potential sources to human infections is poorly understood. For acute Toxoplasma infection in pregnant women, a European case control study to identify risk factors has shown that the majority of infections were food-borne. Between 30% and 63% of the infections were attributed to the consumption of undercooked or cured meat, whereas only 6% to 17% were attributed to soil contact (Cook et al., 2000). Nevertheless, there remains a large uncertainty around source attribution and well designed studies are needed in the future.