Overhead costs, for example considering the space occupied by laboratory equipment, rent for laboratory buildings or maintenance charges have been assumed to be roughly
equal and are not included in this calculation. Costs for staff training as well as the implementation and validation of a PCR test or FISH test are also not considered in this
calculation. Hands-on time for PCR and traditional cultivation and bacterial enrichment were adopted from previous economic evaluations and costs were calculated according
to German labour costs. Material costs for PCR detection depend on the price of
the used real-time PCR kit; two up-to-date offers from two manufacturers of pathogen detection kits served as the calculation basis.