There is always a need to weigh up costs against benefits and in doing so one of the more difficult problems is to come up with a monetary measure for different benefits. This chapter of the book, Water Quality: Guidelines, Standards and Health (2001), examines some of the instruments available to guide priority-setting and their use in assessing water and sanitation interventions.

This document has been developed with the aim to provide an overview of currently used methods for economic evaluation and to discuss implications of using these methods for evaluating environmental health interventions. It aims at formulating recommendations for future evaluations in environmental health. The document is intended to contribute to the methodological discussions, and in particular the development of guidelines for evaluation of cost-effectiveness in the framework of WHO’s initiatives, and other ongoing work in this area. This work constitutes a background document with preliminary considerations of methods for economic evaluations in environmental health.

The purpose of this study was to determine the magnitude and distribution of acute gastrointestinal illness (GI) in the Chilean population, describe its burden and presentation, identify risk factors associated with GI and assess the differences between a 7-day, 15-day and a 30-day recall period in the population-based burden of illness study design.

The primary goal of this report is to supply objective and comparable information on the magnitude of the economic burden or cost of illness and injury in Canada based on standard reporting units and methods.

This paper discusses the importance of estimating the global burden of foodborne diseases and describes the efforts of the Foodborne Disease Burden Epidemiology Reference Group (FERG). FERG is an initiative of The World Health Organization (WHO) to estimate the global burden of foodborne diseases and aims to fill the current data gap and respond to the increasing global interest in health information. Collaborative efforts are required to achieve the ambitious task of assessing the foodborne disease burden from all causes worldwide.

This report describes the methods of calculating the costs of illness of foodborne zoonoses in European countries proposed by MED-VET-NET. Specifically, this report details the calculation of Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) as the sum of the number of years of life lost due to mortality (YLL) and the number of years of life lost due to disability (YLD), and the calculation of the Cost of Illness as the sum of direct health care costs (DHC), direct non-health care costs (DNHC), and indirect non-health care costs (INHC).

Tool for estimating the costs of illness for selected foodborne illnesses. Assumptions used in the estimate may be changed to reflect the desired scenario. ERS calculated costs are also given, and the assumptions used in calculating these costs may be examined