economic burden
kkrisberg | May 18, 2017A Zika attack rate of just 1 percent across the six states most at risk for the mosquito-borne disease could result in $1.2 billion in medical costs and lost productivity, a new study finds. That’s more than the $1.1 billion in emergency Zika funding that Congress approved last year after months of delay and which is expected to run out this summer.
“One of the troubling things last year was that (Zika funding) was viewed as a cost — every week, there was another delay and more people becoming infected and more chances of birth defects,” study co-author Bruce Y. Lee, an associate professor at…
kkrisberg | October 14, 2016Another day, another study on the benefit of vaccines. This time, it’s a study on the economic cost of vaccine-preventable diseases among U.S. adults — a cost that likely surpasses your wildest guesses.
Published this week in Health Affairs, the study found that vaccine-preventable diseases affecting adults cost the American economy $8.95 billion in 2015, with unvaccinated adults accounting for $7.1 billion of that total. To conduct the study, researchers examined the economic burden associated with 10 vaccines that protect against hepatitis A; hepatitis B; shingles (or herpes zoster); human…
kkrisberg | February 14, 2014Most people infected with mosquito-borne West Nile virus don’t experience any symptoms at all. However, the tiny percentage of cases that do end up in the hospital total hundreds of millions of dollars in medical costs and lost productivity.
Published earlier this week in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, researchers estimated that the cumulative cost of reported hospitalized cases of West Nile virus between 1999 and 2012 totaled $778 million. The study is the first to examine the economic burden of West Nile on infected patients who were hospitalized with conditions such…
cmonforton | January 20, 2012Money talks, as the saying goes, and a recently published paper on the annual cost of work-related injuries and illnesses should get policymakers to listen up. The number is staggering: $250 Billion, and it's a figure on par with health conditions like cancer, coronary heart disease, and diabetes that attract much more attention and research funding.
The author, J. Paul Leigh, PhD, a professor of health economics at University of California Davis, assembled data from more than a dozen sources to estimate the annual economic burden of occupational injuries and illnesses. Using data from 2007…