The exposure of people of the bites of the Anopheles Mosquito results in sickness and if not promptly and efficiently addressed may result in the death of the victim. The process of seeking treatment involves cost to the individual and his household. The fear of contracting malaria also urges people to protect themselves. The theory of averting behaviors predicts that a person will continue to take protective actions as long as the perceived benefits exceed the costs of doing so. Since these processes involve the expense of tangible resources, the resource cost is termed direct cost to the individual and his household in the form of treatment and preventive costs.
In addition, it is the duty of every government to promote and sustain a healthy lifestyle for its people.
The government ensures that resources are provided to maintained and operate a good health system.
This resource cost constitutes the non private medical cost (social cost) to the institution and the society in general if the services are subsided for consumers.
The direct cost of illness to the household (private cost) could be obtained with less controversy since it is an ex-post exercise which could be obtained through recalls. This is however not simple when it comes to the direct costs of a particular disease to the health system. Due to the nature of the health system, certain costs are shared by several activities which make the estimation of the institutional cost of a particular disease difficult. The health system provides general treatment and therefore malaria-related expenditures are often not separated from other health service costs in budgeting and accounting systems.
The best approach to the estimation of the institutional cost is to document precisely the inputs
the total costs and opportunity them using hospital morbidity data. For personal costs, Cheese and Parker (1994) suggested that, the proportion of time spent by staff devoted to the case (disease) of interest could be observed and measured for the proportional calculation of the cost to the disease.
The cost of illness to the economy also includes tax exemptions on imported anti-malarial products.
The direct costs may also include the resources that are spent directly or indirectly by various institutions like local governments, Non- Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and communities.
Indirect Cost
During the period of the sickness, the individual may stop work completely of may work partially due to the debility associated with the disease on temporary bases. Situations like these may affect household production adversely. In certain cases, a household member will have to cut down his / her own duty to cater for the sick or perform the duties of the sick person. The subsequent decline in output in this case is termed indirect cost. These indirect costs mainly represent loss of potential productivity. This is not an out of pocket payment but the opportunity cost of both market and non market (unpaid domestic) productive time lost to the household.
The indirect cost of illness is often estimated through the human capital approach. The human capital approach considers the value of lost productivity as a result of illness and premature mortality. This perspective is based on the application of “neo-classical” market oriented economic principles. The human capital approach is therefore applied within the opportunity cost framework, which is central concept in market economics (Harwood, 1994).
The value of this lost is assumed to be equal to the earnings people could have earned but for the illness. The human capital approach applies forgone wages to estimate lost productivity. The opportunity cost of time could be evaluated as the marginal cost of labor. Brandt (1980) suggested that in subsistence agriculture with easily available land, labor is by far the most important input variable to production. This is because the marginal cost of labor (MCL) could be approximately by the marginal product of labor (MPL).
In a perfect market economy, the marginal product of labor is equal to the workers earning per day on
often used to value the marginal product of labor for this reason. According to Mills (1989) the method that have been used to appraise the lost productive time are varied and include average agricultural wage, salaries, marginal productivity calculated from a Cobb-Douglas production function, income per capita, legislated minimum wage among others. However, Prescott (1999) is with the view that some of these methods may poorly represent the actual marginal product of labor and therefore must be used with caution.
It is possible that mosquito infested areas could have experience reduced land utilization since people would not want to invest in such malarious areas. This could have a negative effect on the development of that area as a result a decline in tourism, agriculture and industrial activities among other things. This constitutes indirect costs to the local economy and the nation as a whole.
Travel times to seek treatment or buy drugs are important indirect cost components in the area where people travel long distances to health facilities and drug stores. Another important indirect cost is waiting time at the health facility.