The Economic Impact of Herpes Zoster Vaccine Disparities in Elderly United States Blacks

La’Marcus T. Wingate, Keisha Stubbs, Iman Ahmed, Rachel K. Mayaka, Mary K. Maneno, Earl Ettienne, Oluchi Elekwachi and Veronica Clarke-Tasker
Additional contact information
La’Marcus T. Wingate: Center for Minority Health Services Research, 2300 4th Street NW, Annex 3, Washington, DC 20059, USA
Keisha Stubbs: Howard University College of Pharmacy, Howard University, 2300 4th Street NW, Chauncey Cooper Hall, Washington, DC 20059, USA
Iman Ahmed: Howard University College of Pharmacy, Howard University, 2300 4th Street NW, Chauncey Cooper Hall, Washington, DC 20059, USA
Rachel K. Mayaka: Center for Minority Health Services Research, 2300 4th Street NW, Annex 3, Washington, DC 20059, USA
Mary K. Maneno: Center for Minority Health Services Research, 2300 4th Street NW, Annex 3, Washington, DC 20059, USA
Earl Ettienne: Center for Minority Health Services Research, 2300 4th Street NW, Annex 3, Washington, DC 20059, USA
Oluchi Elekwachi: US Food and Drug Administration, Office of Minority Health, 10903 New Hampshire Avenue, Silver Spring, MD 20993, USA
Veronica Clarke-Tasker: Howard University College of Nursing and Allied Health Sciences, Howard University, 516 Bryant Street NW, Washington, DC 20059, USA

IJERPH, 2018, vol. 15, issue 10, 1-10

Abstract: There are persistent disparities with regard to receipt of herpes zoster vaccine among elderly blacks, but no data is available regarding the public health or economic impact of these disparities. A decision tree was constructed with multiple Markov nodes in order to estimate the preventable cases of herpes zoster occurring among elderly blacks due to disparities in receipt of herpes zoster vaccine and to quantify the economic costs associated with these disparities. The model was constructed to examine the number of herpes zoster cases occurring among elderly blacks from the age of 60 to 84 over a 20 year period and also calculated costs due to herpes zoster complications and lost productivity. Achievement of health equity would prevent over 34,500 cases of herpes zoster from occurring in the future and avert over $180 million in lost productivity and treatment costs as a result of these cases of herpes zoster. These results help to show that thousands of cases of herpes zoster could be prevented if blacks were vaccinated at the same frequency as whites and help to show the benefit of implementing viable strategies to achieving this goal.

Keywords: herpes zoster; shingles; vaccination; elderly; blacks; seniors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/15/10/2128/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/15/10/2128/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:15:y:2018:i:10:p:2128-:d:172318

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().