Due to the region's own conditions, universal vaccination with pneumococcal conjugate heptavalent vaccine (PCV-7) in Latin American countries is still controversial.
Objective: To compare projected economic costs and health benefits associated with pneumococcal conjugate heptavalent vaccine as a routine immunization in healthy children in Argentina.
Design: A decision analytic model of Markov simulated lifetime evolution of a birth cohort (n 696,451) was developed and compared costs and health benefits of pneumococcal disease in the presence and absence of vaccination.
Main outcome measures: Cost per life year (LY) gained, reduce in diseases burden and costs of vaccination.
Results: From the society's perspective, the incremental cost per LY gained was US$ 5599.42 and the purchase of the 4 doses of vaccine for the entire cohort with a cost of US$ 26.5 dose requires an investment of US$ 73,823,806.00. The model estimated that vaccination reduce the number of death by 159 cases of meningitis, 756 cases of bacteriemias 4594 cases of pneumonias about 84,769 cases of otitis media and 20 meningitis sequelae. The value of the cost per LY gained was considerably modified by the variation in the cost of the vaccine dose, efficacy/effectiveness of the vaccine for pneumonia the mortality from pneumonia and herd immunity.
Conclusions: Our analysis predicted that routine vaccination of healthy infants <2 years could prevent an important number of pneumococcal infectious and reduce related mortality and morbidity. This strategic could be highly cost-effective in Argentina.
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