OBJECTIVE The purpose of this paper is to describe some of the results of the Morelos HPV Study. The main objective of the Morelos HPV Study is to evaluate the use of human papillomavirus (HPV) DNA testing, as compared to the Papanicolaou (Pap) test, for cervical cancer (CC) screening. MATERIAL AND METHODS The Morelos HPV Study is currently being conducted in Mexico, to examine the possibilit...

The increased importance of non-market values in land management planning means that fire management and planning needs to more directly and effectively incorporate them into the planning and decision-making process. This means developing better understanding of the role of non-market valuation in the context of fire effects in prevention and suppression. It also means better knowledge and syst...

A decision analytical model was developed to investigate the cost-effectiveness of stockpiling antiviral (AV) drugs for a potential influenza pandemic in the United Kingdom and the possible role of near-patient testing in conserving AV drug stocks. Under base-case assumptions (including a fixed stockpile that was smaller than the clinical attack rate), the treat-only option (treating all sympto...

Cost-effectiveness analysis refers to the consideration Of decision alternatives in which both their costs and consequences are taken into account in a systematic way. It is a decisionoriented tool, in that it is designed to ascertain which means of attaining particular educational goals are most efficient. For example, there are many alternative approaches for pursuing such goals as raising re...

We consider the problem of assessing new and existing technologies for their cost-effectiveness in the case where data on both costs and effects are available from a clinical trial, and we address it by means of the cost-effectiveness acceptability curve. The main difficulty in these analyses is that cost data usually exhibit highly skew and heavy-tailed distributions, so that it can be extreme...

Recently, there has been much interest in using the cost-effectiveness acceptability curve (CEAC) to measure the statistical evidence of cost-effectiveness. The CEAC has two well established but fundamentally different interpretations: one frequentist and one Bayesian. As an alternative, we suggest characterizing the statistical evidence about cost-effectiveness using the likelihood function (t...

BACKGROUND The National Department of Health of South Africa decided to start a programme to train mid-level healthcare workers, called clinical associates, as one of the measures to increase healthcare workers at district level in rural areas. Unfortunately, very little is known about the cost effectiveness of clinical associates. AIMS To determine, on a provincial level, the cost effectiven...

We appreciate the efforts of the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to develop economic frameworks and tools for the package of policies necessary to implement California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32) and meet the requirements of the law. These comments are submitted in anticipation of the June 3, 2008 Economic Analysis Technical Stakeholder Working Group meeting, which will f...