Treatment Costs of Pneumonia, Meningitis, Sepsis, And Other Diseases Among Hospitalized Children in Viet Nam (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Globally, nearly two million children die each year due to acute respiratory tract infections (ARIs) (1). Besides, an estimated 150 million episodes of childhood pneumonia occur, of which 11-20 million require hospitalization (2). The incidence of pneumonia among children aged less than five years is estimated to be 0.29 episodes per child-year in developing and 0.05 episodes per child-year in developed countries (2). Recent estimates from the United Nations Children's Fund suggest that Streptococcus pneumoniae causes half of all deaths due to pneumonia in children, and 70% of these deaths occur in Africa and Asia (3). A large proportion of these deaths could be averted through routine immunization using available pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (4,5). However, a substantial barrier to the use of pneumococcal conjugate vaccine is the non-availability of adequate information on costs associated with treatment of clinical conditions consistent with invasive pneumococcal diseases in children. In addition, an increasing number of countries are now requesting or requiring cost-of-illness data on vaccine-preventable diseases before making long-term commitments for the introduction of new vaccines. At present, only a limited number of studies reported costs associated with syndromes of invasive bacterial infections in children from developing countries (6-8). To address this gap in information, we determined costs for the treatment of invasive bacterial infection syndromes in children in Nha Trang, Viet Nam.