Peer-reviewed veterinary case report
Economic principles for resource allocation decisions at national level to mitigate the effects of disease in farm animal populations.
- Journal:
- Epidemiology and infection
- Year:
- 2013
- Authors:
- Howe, K S et al.
- Affiliation:
- College of Social Sciences and International Studies · United Kingdom
Plain-English summary
This paper discusses how to effectively allocate resources to manage diseases in farm animals at a national level. It emphasizes the importance of combining knowledge about disease spread (epidemiology) with economic factors to create a tool that helps evaluate the costs and benefits of monitoring and controlling animal diseases. The authors explain that understanding the relationship between the resources spent on disease prevention and the losses avoided is crucial. They suggest that analyzing how different methods of surveillance and intervention can work together will help improve animal health policies and make them more cost-effective. Overall, the study aims to enhance the way we approach animal health economics.
Abstract
This paper originated in a project to develop a practical, generic tool for the economic evaluation of surveillance for farm animal diseases at national level by a state veterinary service. Fundamental to that process is integration of epidemiological and economic perspectives. Using a generalized example of epidemic disease, we show that an epidemic curve maps into its economic equivalent, a disease mitigation function, that traces the relationship between value losses avoided and mitigation resources expended. Crucially, elementary economic principles show that mitigation, defined as loss reduction achieved by surveillance and intervention, must be explicitly conceptualized as a three-variable process, and the relative contributions of surveillance and intervention resources investigated with regard to the substitution possibilities between them. Modelling the resultant mitigation surfaces for different diseases should become a standard approach to animal health policy analysis for economic efficiency, a contribution to the evolving agenda for animal health economics research.
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Search related cases →Original publication: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22717096/