AARES-SA Event: Food hypersensitivities and quality of life

Date

Time

5:15pm - 6:15pm

Venue

Enterprise Hub, EHG-10, UniSA, City West Campus 9 Light Square, Adelaide SA 5000

Speakers

Professor Dan Rigby, University of Manchester

Specialising in the Economics of Food, Agriculture, Environment and Health.

Description

SPECIAL INVITATION: How do food hypersensitivities affect quality of life and what would people pay to remove them?

Food hypersensitivities (food allergies, coeliac disease and food intolerances) can have large negative impacts on people’s quality of life. This research concerns:

• the economic value of removal of the symptoms and limitations of food hypersensitivities
• which food hypersensitivity impacts most affect quality of life.

To extend the UK’s Cost of Food Illness (CoI) model to include food hypersensitivities a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) was conducted with: 

• adults regarding their own food hypersensitivity
• parents/carers regarding their child’s food hypersensitivity.

This yielded estimates of the annual WTP to remove the symptoms and limitations of food allergies, coeliac disease and food intolerances. 

In estimating the annual value of removal we find that for a significant minority of people with a food hypersensitivity there is a substantial minimum period for removal to be desirable (even at zero cost). The adjustment costs are sufficiently large to make 1 ,3 ,5, 10 and even 20-year periods of condition removal undesirable. 

We test for the impact on WTP of individual level severity of condition via individual-specific values of validated Quality of Life (QoL) instruments (for example the Food Allergy Quality of Life Questionnaire, (FAQLQ)).

Those QoL measures comprise many items, with each given an equal weighting. We investigate the validity of this equal weighting via a Best Worst Scaling (BWS) exercise. This reveals that people assign very different levels of importance to different QoL impacts, with embarrassment and fear related to eating out/social situations in the top three impacts for all 3 hypersensitivities.

About the event:

This event is free to attend for AARES members and non-members.  Networking and refreshments will follow the seminar at the West Oak Hotel.
Please contact Bethany Cooper if you have any questions about this event.

RSVP: by Tuesday 28 March, 2023