Background: Stunting hinders the development of children around the world.

Objectives: Wehavecalculated the burden of disease attributable to protein and energy malnutrition (PEM) in Ghana and evaluated the impact of the modeled intervention to prevent stunting in Ghana.

Methods: A literature review was conducted to better understand the economic implications of stunting. The burden of PEM was measured in Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) and income lost. A culturally sensitive nutritional intervention was designed to prevent stunting in the target population. The comparator was no intervention. We performed cost-effectiveness, cost-utility, and cost-benefit analyses.

Results: The estimated income lost due to PEM in Ghana was over 70 bln2014 international dollars (I$). In 2014 the Ghana GDP per capita was I$4,548.00. The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) per stunting case averted was I$2,573.72. The ICER per DALY averted was I$896.18. The cost-benefit ratio was 0.03.

Conclusion: Stunting causes a high burden to society in Ghana. The modelled backyard poultryintervention is very cost-effective in reducing stunting and it effects.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of vaccination against pertussis in epidemiological and economic terms. The estimation was based on available epidemiological data linked to an obligatory vaccination programme and morbidity in the Polish population. The economic evaluation included data on funds spent on the purchase of vaccines and the cost of outpatient and hospital treatment of patients spent from the state budget. The analysis of epidemiological data confirmed that the decrease in the level of vaccination of the population in combination with shortening the time of immunization resulted in an increase in the incidence of whooping cough. Economic analysis showed that the costs associated with the implementation of a vaccination program are lower than the direct costs of treatment of pertussis per patient. Vaccinations should be a fundamental tool in the fight against infectious diseases despite emerging reports of adverse events or evasion of vaccination. There are economic and epidemiological arguments for broadening the scope of vaccination against pertussis as well as extending the vaccination calendar by inclusion of currently recommended (not financed by the state) vaccines.

The chronic character of the disease has a significant impact on expenses borne by individual patients and by the health care system. Patients diagnosed with epilepsy need a long-term treatment, which is often expensive. In order to minimize the costs, doctors are increasingly turning to prescribing cheaper generic drugs. On the one hand, from an economic perspective, such a solution is cost-effective; on the other hand, the choice of an inadequate treatment may have serious consequences for the patient’s health. Patients using drugs with a narrow therapeutic index should be careful because of differences in bioequivalence of medicinal products. An inadequate alteration of the treatment for epilepsy, either by replacing the original drug with a generic one or by replacing one generic drug with another,  may adversely affect the patient’s condition. It is important, then, that therapeutic decisions should not be guided chiefly by considerations of cost reduction for the patient, but first of all by possible future health effects.

A System of Health Accounts (SHA), recently adopted by the European Commission as a statistical framework for reporting data and metadata on health care expenditure and financing have paved the path for systematic data collection in the field which is indispensable for ensuring transparency and accountability of health care system on the Member States' level and for adequacy of many health policy recommendations on the EU level. The purpose of this paper is therefore to present  selected aspects of the informative and analytical power of the core and extended accounting framework of the System of Health Accounts (SHA) in the context of health care system accountability with emphasis put on the role of the European Commission in straightening it among MS. A special attention is paid to one of the SHA newly developed analytical interfaces i.e. the ‘consumer health interface’ which has potential to be used for conducting multidimensional analyses of health spending by patient characteristics, including diseases and health conditions.