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Common
and Costly,
Colds Account for Billions
Excerpt
By Charnicia
E. Huggins,
Reuters
Health
Colds are not only common, they are
also costly, according to research released Monday.
Forty billion US dollars are spent
each year due to missed days from school and work, visits to the
doctor and over-the-counter medications, according to a team of
Michigan and Florida researchers.
"Every parent knows the cost of
colds goes far beyond buying a bottle of cough syrup," Dr. A.
Mark Fendrick of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor told
Reuters Health. A child's illness can often throw a wrench into
a parent's plans and make them miss work or spend extra money
for a babysitter if the child stays home from school, he said.
To investigate the total impact
of the common cold the researchers conducted a telephone survey
of over 4,000 adults nationwide and extrapolated those findings
to the US population.
Nearly three-quarters of the survey
respondents said they had had a cold during the previous 12 months,
and these cold sufferers reported having two to three colds per
year, Fendrick and his team report in the Archives of Internal
Medicine.
Based on this finding, there are
approximately 500 million cold episodes each year in the US, the
researchers note.
What's more, the economic impact
of these colds--including direct and indirect costs--is almost
$40 billion each year, the report indicates.
Direct costs--such as doctor visits
and prescription drugs--account for about $17 billion of this
price tag. They estimate that colds cost $22 billion in indirect
costs, such as costs associated with missed days from work and
school.
Overall, children throughout the
US miss an estimated 189 million school days because of colds,
and parents caring for these sick children miss about 126 million
workdays. Employees also miss an additional 70 million workdays
because they themselves are sick with a cold.
"Hence, when it comes to burden
of illness, there is nothing common about the common cold," Fendrick
and his team conclude.
A grant from ViroPharma, Inc. funded
the study. Fendrick and his co-authors serve as consultants to
the Pennsylvania-based company, a pharmaceutical firm that develops
and markets antiviral medications.
SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine
2003;163:487-494.
Reference
Source 89
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