PIN15 - Economic Burden of Dengue in Japan: Results from National Database

Abstract

Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne disease. Its common symptoms are high fever, rash, severe headache. Some of the patients have severe symptoms such as dengue hemorrhage fever. Although it had been an imported infectious disease in Japan, domestic dengue infections were found in 2014. Due to rapid globalization and global warming, Japan may have more dengue infections in future. Economic burden of dengue and its social impact are important information to formulate a policy toward its control. We estimated an annual economic burden of dengue in Japan from costs for each patient from societal perspective. The economic burden consisted of direct medical cost and indirect cost of dengue fever. The direct medical cost were estimated from direct medical cost of dengue patients’ data extracted from the national database of medical bill between 2011 and 2015. We estimated the indirect cost by multiplying the treatment days with the average wage reported in Basic Survey on Wage Structure. We converted Japanese Yen using the average 2011 exchange rate of 79.73 JPY to US$1. The average number of dengue patients was 274 per year. The average economic burden was $830,626 per year (direct medical cost: $629,861; indirect cost: $200,765). The economic burden of dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever per patient was $2,093 (direct medical cost: $1,866; indirect cost: $227) and $11,536 (direct medical cost: $11,124; indirect cost: $412), respectively. The economic burden of dengue fever in Japan that we estimated was smaller than that of endemic countries, but the individual economic burden was quite huge. The limitation is that these results might have included treatment cost for comorbidities which may have raised direct medical cost. Our results can be used for cost-effectiveness analysis and total budget estimation for dengue prevention strategy.