Disease burden and related medical costs of rotavirus infections in Taiwan

BMC Infectious Diseases

Table 5 Normalized medical costs for rotavirus acute gastroenteritis (AGE) hospitalizations in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States (USA)

	Taiwan	Hong Kong^b	USA^c
Direct medical cost for rotavirus AGE (in US $)	7–10 mil	4 mil	217 mil
Population^a	22.9 mil	6.8 mil	285.3 mil
Medical cost per capita (A)	0.31–0.44	0.59	0.76
Gross National Incomes (GNI) per capita^a (B)	16,170	26,060	34,800
Normalized economic burden index due to rotavirus AGE (A/B × 10⁵)	1.92–2.72	2.28	2.19

^a Population and GNI per capita in 2001 was used [References 14 and 17].
^b The Hong Kong study was based on hospital data of 2001–2003 [reference 16].
^c Because the direct medical costs estimate for USA was reported in 1996 dollars [reference 15], and we used the population and GNI data from 2001, the upper range of their sensitivity for cost estimate was used (4,346 US $ per hospitalization × 50,000 hospitalizations)

ISSN: 1471-2334