Methodology Study For Asessessment Of Ecnomic Costs To Food-Borne Diseases

In order to know how serious costs of food-borne diseases is, estimate cost-benefit of food safety standards and regulations, allocate health resources better, and control food-borne diseases more effectively, Economic costs of food-borne diseases must be estimated. Seeing that there’s no systematic method to estimate economic costs to food-borne diseases in China, This subject is chosen and a systematic method has been established of evaluating economic cost of food-borne disease. The process of estimating costs of food-borne diseases is established and the methodology of estimating costs of food-borne diseases in China is established. Costs for cases and their parents in melamine event is estimated due to this method. This study can provide reference and guidance to estimate costs of food-borne disease in China in the future.The process of estimating costs of food-borne diseases is as follows:Step1, ascertaining the incidence, prevalence of food-borne disease and the numbers of cases. Step2, classifying food-borne disease according to severity categories. Step3, ascertaining the therapeutic schedule of each severity categories of food-borne disease. Step4, ascertaining the perspective of costs of food-borne diseases. Step5, establishing the method of estimating costs of food-borne diseases. Step6, calculating costs of food-borne disease.Costs of food-borne includes direct costs and indirect costs. Direct costs include test cost, drugs cost, cost of hospitalization, operation cost and so on, prevalence-based method is used to estimate this kind of costs. Indirect costs include the lost production of the patient and caregiver and loss of the premature death. The lost production of the patient and caregiver is derived by estimating the amount of time lost due to food-borne and multiplying it by the rate of daily earnings. Value of a statistical life (VOSL) is used to represent the cost of lost productivity of premature death. And the approach linking willingness to pay and human capital method is used to estimate VOSL. Method to estimate costs of food-borne disease in this study, especially method of estimating cost of indirect cost can provide reference to estimating costs of food-borne diseases in China.The method described above is used to estimate costs for cases and their parents in food-borne disease due to melamine. and the study shows that total costs is2.40415billion with59.345million of direct costs and more than1.8billion of indirect costs. From this study, we can know that the proportion of indirect costs is large, but cost of food-borne diseases study in China focus on direct cost study, so indirect cost estimating should be strengthened in estimating of costs to food-borne diseases in China. This result can be considered as the lower limit estimation because most conservative hypothesis for the variables in our estimating is used.