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Issue a boil-water advisory or wait for definitive information? A decision analysis
Michael M Wagner1, Garrick L Wallstrom, Agnieszka Onisko
1RODS Laboratory, Center for Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, USA.
Objective:
Study the decision to issue a boil-water advisory in response to a spike in sales of diarrhea remedies or wait 72 hours for the results of definitive testing of water and people.
Methods:
Decision analysis.
Results:
In the base-case analysis, the optimal decision is test-and-wait. If the cost of issuing a boil-water advisory is less than 13.92 cents per person per day, the optimal decision is to issue the boil-water advisory immediately.
Conclusions:
Decisions based on surveillance data that are suggestive but not conclusive about the existence of a disease outbreak can be modeled.
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