Definition of cost of illness

The cost of illness approach is based on the premise that reduction in national output, which arises as a consequence of an incidence of a foodborne-disease measures the reduction in welfare that it causes.

An accounting approach is adopted which sums up medical expenses, foregone earnings of affected individuals and associated productivity losses to employers.

Once the cost to the individual of varying degrees of severity of infection have been estimated they are combined with epidemiological information on cases an outbreaks of disease to estimate the aggregate costs.

One problem with this approach is that the epidemiological information is notoriously under-reported, for example.

There was a report that only 1-5% of cases are reported in US and there were suggestions a range of 1- 10% in the UK.

For the United States there have been estimated the actual number of acute food-borne illnesses, hospitalization and deaths and these numbers can be used in economic analysis.

Missing from the report numbers are the chronic complications that occur in a small percentage of cases but are associated with most pathogens.

These are important since the economics costs of possibly lifelong complications, such as kidney failure, mental retardation, and paralysis, have a high economics cost to society.
Definition of cost of illness