Modeling the Economic Impact of Pandemic Influenza: A Case Study in Turkey

Abstract

Influenza pandemics have occurred intermittently throughout the 20th century and killed millions of people worldwide. It is expected that influenza pandemics will continue to occur in the near future. Huge number of deaths and cases is the most troublesome aspect of the influenza pandemics, but the other important trouble is the economic impact of the influenza pandemics to the countries. In this study, we try to detect the cost of a possible influenza pandemic under different scenarios and attack rates. We include the vaccination and antiviral treatment cost for direct cost and we add the work absenteeism cost to the calculations for indirect cost of influenza pandemics. As a case study, we calculate the economic impact of pandemic influenza for Turkey under three different scenarios and three different attack rates. Our optimistic estimation shows that the economic impact of pandemic influenza will be between 1.364 billion dollars and 2.687 billions dollars to Turkish economy depending on the vaccination strategies.

Vaccinating healthcare workers: Level of implementation, barriers and proposal for evidence-based policies in Turkey

“…estimated the average cost of an influenza pandemic including direct medical and indirect costs, which may hit Turkey, in a best-case scenario, to be in the 1.4B dollars (USD) and 2.7B dollars (USD) range. 35 The researchers note vaccination as the most effective and safest route of protection against influenza pandemics and outbreaks. Furthermore, the fear and social restrictions fed by the pandemics have almost immeasurable costs.…”

Influenza vaccines in low and middle income countries

“…The latter was excluded since it was not a full economic evaluation and modeled the economic impact of the pandemic (H1N1) 2009 influenza on the society by means of estimating costs of a possible influenza pandemic under different scenarios and attack rates. 27 Relevant economic evaluation studies of seasonal vaccines were published in the English (12), Spanish (3), Russian (3) and Chinese (3) languages. Twelve of these studies had to be excluded because the full text was not accessible in any way and the abstract did not provide sufficient information on results, 28,29 because the study was conducted in a HIC, 30 because the study assessed costs of influenza vaccine co-administered other studies from a third party public payer perspective.…”

Cost-Effectiveness of Increasing Influenza Vaccination Coverage in Adults with Type 2 Diabetes in Turkey

“…The average cost for patients with diabetes hospitalized with severe influenza disease in Turkey was estimated to be TRY 2079 in 2014 based on data from hospital-based surveillance network [ 37 ]. For DSA of inpatient cost, the lower bound was based on Turkish data [ 41 ] and the upper-bound was based on data from WHO-CHOICE [ 39 ]. For PSA, a lognormal distribution was used.…”