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The human cost of not being vaccinated is well known: measles, diphtheria and other epidemics reported worldwide.
All very useless. The story of vaccine success is well-documented – Nearly 200 million cases of polio, measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, adenovirus, rabies and hepatitis A – and about 450,000 deaths from these diseases – have been prevented. United States between 1963 and 2015 by vaccination, the researchers estimate in a 2016 study.
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However, public health departments, health facilities and, ultimately, the taxpayer have an economic cost and considerable manpower.
After the Utah Department of Health declared its measles epidemic, linked to the Disneyland epidemic, late 2015, we find:
The Utah Department of Health (UDOH) has made more than 1,600 phone calls to 117 people placed in voluntary quarantine. These people were monitored daily for symptoms of the disease throughout their 21-day quarantine. The Utah Public Health Laboratory (UPHL) performed 29 laboratory tests and sent two samples to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for confirmatory testing. The Utah County Department of Health administered 586 doses of measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) in January alone, and recorded more than 600 hours of work (UCHD generally administers approximately 100 vaccinations compared to a vaccine per month). In addition, the public health sector partnered with the Utah Poison Center, which handled nearly 300 phone calls from the public.
The direct cost of public health for the response to the measles outbreak was approximately $ 115,000.. These costs include such things as the hours of work of public health staff: about 90 employees worked for nearly 3,000 hours on the outbreak, including administration of vaccines and immunoglobulin and laboratory tests. The estimate does not include other indirect costs, such as education and public awareness, provider consultation done by local health departments or the costs badociated with private health care. These costs are difficult to determine, but would certainly increase the overall cost of responding to the epidemic.
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In 2017, the measles outbreak in Minnesota, which affected some 79 people, mostly children, cost the state's health department $ 2.3 million in the five months that 39, lasted the epidemic.
Public health costs related to disease investigations in two single measles cases in 2016-17 in Denver, Colorado, were estimated at $ 49,769 and $ 18,423, respectively.
Other published estimates of public health agency response costs to a single measles case range from $ 5,655 to $ 181,679.
Finally, the case of an unvaccinated Oregon boy who contracted tetanus in 2017 resulted in huge medical costs.
The boy needed 57 days of acute inpatient care, including 47 days in the intensive care unit. Hospitalization costs total $ 811,929 (excluding airfare, inpatient rehabilitation and outpatient fees).
The health care costs needed to treat this child's preventable illness were about 72 times higher than the average cost (2012) of US $ 11,143 for pediatric hospitalization in the United States. A recent report describing cases of adult tetanus included hospitalization costs ranging from $ 22,229 to $ 1,024,672.
Not getting vaccinated is not only dangerous, but can also be very expensive. All pretty avoidable.
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