PhD defence K.M. (Klas) Kellerborg

Communicable diseases have caused a large disease burden throughout history. Improvements in disease surveillance, public health campaigns, and medical technologies have mitigated the impact of this burden in recent decades. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that infectious outbreaks still pose a threat to population health and can cause large economic losses. To combat such threats,  further investments in interventions that prevent and treat infectious diseases are needed. Such interventions will need to compete with other spending opportunities for finite (healthcare) resources. Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA), where the incremental costs and benefits of healthcare interventions are estimated, can be used to support this prioritization and ensure efficient use of the healthcare budget. However, which costs are to be included in CEAs of interventions aiming to combat communicable disease is still a topic for debate. The focus of this thesis is to explore the methods used in the CEA of interventions against infectious diseases and to better understand which costs should be included and how these costs should be estimated.

In this thesis we reviewed how the societal perspective is currently internationalized within infectious disease economic evaluations. We explored where the main body of costs fall and aimed to improve these methods. We updated current future medical cost estimates and improved on the methods of estimating future non-medical costs. A tool was built to facilitate standardized inclusion of these costs. Furthermore, we explored the impact of the inclusion of these costs in case studies of economic evaluations of interventions against infectious diseases.

Due to the lockdown, the PhD defences will not take place publicly in the usual way. A live stream link has been provided to candidate. The ceremony will begin exactly at 10:30.