Paralytic Polio

this project was realized in R and ourdataworld :

The cost of the GPEI in a comparative perspective
To put these numbers into perspective, global malaria financing amounted to US-$2.9 billion in 2015 which was more than twice as large as the GPEI's budget of US-$1.39 billion one year later in 2016.

Or, to give a second comparison, in 2016, the US government spent US-$1,116 billion on major health care projects, a budget that is more than 800 times larger than the GPEI's global spending on polio in the same year.

Benefits of eradication rather than reduction
In 2013, the GPEI implemented “The Polio Eradication and Endgame Strategic Plan 2013-2018”, costing an additional $5.5 billion in addition to the already $9 billion spent by the organization since its implementation in 1988.

The initiative hopes to especially finance the last stretch of vaccination campaigns in the countries where polio is still endemic, keep the remaining countries polio-free, and closely monitor the occurrence for at least three years after the last reported case.

Even though the additional financial needs seem very high, the GPEI argues that eradication is the most cost-effective strategy, by illustrating that the long-term costs of controlling rather than eradicating will be substantially higher.

The benefits of eradicating polio extend beyond the health domain of having fewer people suffering from paralytic polio. In the economic domain, fewer polio patients translate into lower healthcare costs. Furthermore, once the virus has been eradicated, the world can stop producing and administering the polio vaccine as well as surveilling paralytic diseases suspected to be polio.

The GPEI argues that the discontinuation of these costly activities will therefore result in extensive economic gains from eradication as well. It is very difficult to accurately estimate these economic gains as it requires assumptions on for example the marginal economic value of a healthy person over a paralyzed polio patient or until what year you calculate these gains for. Tebbens et al. (2010)42 have attempted such a modeling exercise and arrived at a net benefit of US-$40-50 billion — when comparing the GPEI against just national routine immunization — in the time horizon between 1988 to 2035.

Such a cost-benefit analysis is made even more difficult by having to extrapolate the actual case counts from reported incidence figures, which is explained in more detail in our article here.