Health Economics to Advance Sleeping Sickness Elimination

Global health decision-makers use frameworks to support them with creating strategies to meet global elimination targets for diseases, such as sleeping sickness. In a recent study by Swiss TPH, researchers proposed a new health economic framework that uses a unique combination of uncertainty, cost-effectiveness and elimination to support the World Health Organizations (WHO) goal of eliminating sleeping sickness by 2030. Gambiense Human African trypanosomiasis (gHAT), also known as sleeping sickness, is almost always fatal without treatment. The vector-borne parasitic disease transmitted by infected tsetse flies affects mainly West and Central African countries, with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) being the most impacted. To contribute to reaching the WHO targets of elimination by 2030, Swiss TPH and partners have devised a health economic framework to quantify the efficiency of sleeping sickness elimination, and to aid discussions among stakeholders with different objectives. -Our framework presents an extension to the net-benefits framework to improve what is currently used by decision-makers in order to support them with efficient resource allocation,- said Fabrizio Tediosi, Group Leader of Health Systems and Policies at Swiss TPH. -This framework considers the implications of switching to a strategy with a higher likelihood of meeting the global target of elimination.