How much does chlamydia screening cost and is it worth introducing? That is, will the savings from future disease averted offset the screening costs (will it be cost saving?), and if it will not, is the extra health “bought” by screening worth it, in terms of alternative uses of the same resources? Here, Roberts et al¹ provide a valuable critique of the literature on the cost effectiveness of chlamydia screening. Despite a large body of published work, their paper highlights the lack of appropriate methods used in the majority of previous studies.

To correctly model the full effects of screening for an infectious disease like chlamydia (including …