title: Diagnosing food-borne illness: a behavioral analysis of barriers to testing.
abstract: Public health authorities rely on the timely flow of laboratory results to detect and control food-borne illnesses. At times, social and economic barriers limit individuals' ability to get needed tests. We demonstrate a simple behavioral approach to assess the cost-effectiveness of interventions designed to remove three social and economic barriers to testing individuals with acute diarrheal illness: testing costs, income loss, and inconvenience. We use readily available statistics to rank programs by their cost effectiveness to identify those most worthy of studying in greater detail.
authors.affiliation: Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. gkaptan@andrew.cmu.edu
authors.forename: Gülbanu
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Kaptan
authors.forename: Baruch
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Fischhoff
mesh_terms: D000208:Acute Disease; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D003967:Diarrhea / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000209:etiology; D005516:Food Microbiology; D005517:Foodborne Diseases / Q000175:diagnosis*; D015438:Health Behavior; D006293:Health Promotion / Q000191:economics / Q000592:standards; D006297:Health Services Accessibility; D006801:Humans; D017057:Medically Uninsured; D018582:Sick Leave / Q000191:economics; D014481:United States