MONDAY, Feb. 24, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- There is another reason to dread the sneezes, stuffy noses and scratchy throats of winter: Along with making you miserable, colds carry a big price tag.
Every time a person in the United States has a cold, it costs roughly $80 in direct and indirect expense, researchers estimate in the Feb. 24 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine. And, they add, the overall cost of the common cold is $40 billion annually.
That exorbitant amount makes the common cold more expensive to treat than many other more serious illnesses, including asthma and heart disease, they write.
The problem is the common cold is just that -- way too common.
Because a nationwide survey found that 72 percent of those polled report getting at least two colds annually (an average of 2.5), the cost really adds up, the researchers found.
Aside from lost days of work, associated illness such as ear infection, prescription drugs, and over-the-counter medications used to keep the symptoms at bay, what really pushes the cost up is visits to health-care providers, notes lead author Dr. A. Mark Fendrick, co-director of the Consortium for Health Outcomes at the University of Michigan Health System.
"The one thing that surprised me is how often people with the common cold use the health-care system," he says.
The common cold leads to more than 100 million physician visits annually, he notes. Many of those surveyed said their children had most of the colds, so suggesting people curb visits to their doctors or emergency rooms may not be reasonable, he adds.
"You could certainly understand how a nervous parent would want to make sure their child was not suffering from something more serious," he says.
Gerald Kominski, associate director of the University of California in Los Angeles' Center for Health Policy Research recalls that when his daughter was young, she got ear infections whenever she had a cold, which prompted several visits to the doctor. Even his own colds have sometimes caused him to seek medical care.
"When I get a cold, I live with it, but more than once it's turned into a sinus infection," he says.
For the study, Fendrick and his colleagues gathered data from the telephone survey of 4,051 households. Those interviewed reported on their own experience and that of a child, if they had children, who had most recently suffered a cold.
They were told the definition of cold (stuffy nose, scratchy throat and sneezing of about one week's duration with little or no fever) to differentiate it from influenza, which is potentially more serious.
Those polled were then asked about their experiences, whether or not they sought medical help and what medications they had taken.
The researchers also looked at absenteeism estimates for infected individuals and parents of infected children extrapolated from the National Health Interview Survey Data.
While a final cost of $40 billion a year was decided upon, that estimate may actually be low, Fendrick says. He notes it's hard to measure such things as the lost productivity of a mother who works from home, or the more serious complications of colds suffered by those with compromised immune systems.
But the researchers did estimate that Americans spent $2.9 billion on over-the-counter drugs and $1.1 billion on antibiotics, even though the latter have no effect on viral illnesses.
A pharmaceutical company developing an antiviral agency to treat colds funded the study.
Kominski says he doesn't see a problem with the fact that the drug company may benefit from the finding. If a company develops an antiviral that helps cuts these high costs, "more power to them," he says.
He adds he found the study interesting, and thinks the estimate is reasonable. "That sounds about right." When he has a cold, he says, "I go through a bottle of Nyquil and miss a day or half a day of work."
While it may surprise people to learn the financial burden of the cold is higher than bypass surgery, he says it's important to remember that any other condition would have to be very common to rival the cost of the common cold.
Fendrick says the point of the study was simply to find out how much the common cold costs, and to be able to show that "a very commonly occurring little-ticket item may have a greater aggregate cost than a life-threatening, newsworthy illness."
More information
Read more about the cost of the common cold at American Lung Association and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
