Superbugs: should antimicrobial resistance be included as a cost in economic evaluation?

This paper argues that increasing resistance to antimicrobials is an important social externality that has not been captured at the level of economic appraisal. The paper explicitly considers reasons why the externality of antimicrobial resistance has not generally been included as a cost in economic evaluations comparing management strategies for infectious diseases. Four reasons are considered: first, that the absolute cost of antimicrobial resistance is too small to be worth including; second, that there is an implicit discounting of the costs of antimicrobial resistance on the basis of time preference which makes the cost too small to be worth including; third, that there is an implicit discounting of the costs of antimicrobial resistance on the basis of uncertainty which makes the cost too small to be worth including; and fourth, that the costs are too difficult to measure. Although there does not appear to be methodological justification for excluding the costs of antimicrobial resistance, it seems likely that, because of the practical difficulties associated with measuring these costs, they will continue to be ignored. The paper concludes with a discussion of the applicability of standard policy responses used to deal with externalities in other areas of welfare economics.