1 million people are predicted to get infected with Lyme disease in the USA in 2018. Given the same incidence rate of Lyme disease in Europe as in the USA, then 2.4 million people will get infected with Lyme disease in Europe in 2018. In the USA by 2050, 55.7 million people (12% of the population) will have been infected with Lyme disease. In Europe by 2050, 134.9 million people (17% of the population) will have been infected with Lyme disease. Most of these infections will, unfortunately, become chronic.
The estimated treatment cost for acute and chronic Lyme disease for 2018 for the USA is somewhere between 4.8 billion USD and 9.6 billion USD and for Europe somewhere between 10.1 billion EUR and 20.1 billion EUR.
If governments do not finance IV treatment with antibiotics for chronic Lyme disease, then the estimated government cost for chronic Lyme disease for 2018 for the USA is 10.1 billion USD and in Europe 20.1 billion EUR.
If governments in the USA and Europe want to minimize future costs and maximize future revenues, then they should pay for IV antibiotic treatment up to a year even if the estimated cure rate is as low as 25%. The cost for governments of having chronic Lyme patients sick in perpetuity is very large."
Posted by Keebler (Member # 12673) on :
- Thanks so much. It is such an important aspect to chronic stealth infections.
I always like to first look to who is writing this, what "magazine" it is. I can't find much quickly on the author (Marcus Davidsson) but will maybe look later to see if he has other similar works. The publication, itself, is new to me and nice to see this.
MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) is an academic open access publisher with headquarters in Basel, Switzerland.
Additional offices are located in Beijing and Wuhan (China), Barcelona (Spain) as well as in Belgrade (Serbia). MDPI publishes 191 diverse peer-reviewed, scientific, open access, electronic journals, including . . . . -
Posted by Robin123 (Member # 9197) on :
I want to add - I heard somewhere that maybe 6% of China is infected. Folks, if that is true, China has over a billion people. Do the math.