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While demands for animal disease surveillance systems are growing, there has been little applied research that has examined the interactions between resource allocation, cost-effectiveness, and behavioral considerations of actors throughout the livestock supply chain in a surveillance system context. These interactions are important as feedbacks between surveillance decisions and disease evolution may be modulated by their contextual drivers, influencing the cost-effectiveness of a given surveillance system. This paper identifies a number of key behavioral aspects involved in animal health surveillance systems and reviews some novel methodologies for their analysis. A generic framework for analysis is discussed, with exemplar results provided to demonstrate the utility of such an approach in guiding better disease control and surveillance decisions.

Animal disease outbreaks pose significant threats to livestock sectors throughout the world, both from the standpoint of the economic impacts of the disease itself and the measures taken to mitigate the risk of disease introduction. These impacts are multidimensional and not always well understood, complicating effective policy response. In the developing world, livestock diseases have broader, more nuanced effects on markets, poverty, and livelihoods, given the diversity of uses of livestock and complexity of livestock value chains. In both settings, disease control strategies, particularly those informed by ex ante modeling platforms, often fail to recognize the constraints inherent among farmers, veterinary services, and other value chain actors. In short, context matters. Correspondingly, an important gap in the animal health economics literature is the explicit incorporation of behavior and incentives in impact analyses that highlight the interactions of disease with its socio-economic and institutional setting. In this paper, we examine new approaches and frameworks for the analysis of economic and poverty impacts of animal diseases. We propose greater utilization of "bottom-up" analyses, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of value chain and information economics approaches in impact analyses and stressing the importance of improved integration between the epidemiology of disease and its relationships with economic behavior., (Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Countries contemplating a change in their animal disease control policy face a variety of considerations, particularly in circumstances in which disease status, and the use (or not) of vaccines to control or minimise disease risk, has major implications for international trade. Uruguay and its neighbours are contemplating new FMD policy measures, including the cessation of blanket vaccination, in order to improve the quality, quantity and diversity of their markets. The NO vaccination PLUS strategy would cost less than the current FMD vaccination (as there is no cost of vaccine purchase and deployment), and is estimated to cost US$30.2 million, a saving compared to the current policy (Vaccination). [Extracted from the article]

Animal diseases are global issues affecting the productivity and financial profitability of affected farms. Johne’s disease is distributed on farms worldwide and is an endemic contagious bacterial infection in ruminants caused by Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis. In cattle, the clinical disease manifests itself as chronic enteritis resulting in reduced production, weight loss, and eventually death. Johne’s disease is prevalent in the UK, including Scotland. Direct costs and losses associated with Johne’s disease have been estimated in previous research, confirming an important economic impact of the disease in UK herds. Despite this, the distributional impact of Johne’s disease among milk consumers and producers in Scotland has not been estimated. In this paper, we evaluate the change in society’s economic welfare, namely to dairy producers (i.e. infected and uninfected herds) and milk consumers in Scotland induced by the introduction of Johne’s disease in the national Scottish dairy herd. At the national-level, we conclude that the economic burden falls mainly on producers of infected herds and, to a lesser extent, milk consumers, while producers of uninfected herds benefit from the presence of Johne’s. An infected producer’s loss per cow is approximately two times larger in magnitude than that of an uninfected producer’s gain. Such economic welfare estimates are an important comparison of the relative costs of national herd prevalence and the wider economic welfare implications for both producers and consumers. This is particularly important from a policy, public good, cost sharing, and human health perspective. The economic welfare framework presented in this paper can be applied to other diseases to examine the relative burden of society’s economic welfare of alternative livestock disease scenarios. In addition, the sensitivity analysis evaluates uncertainty in economic welfare given limited data and uncertainty in the national herd prevalence, and other input parameters, associated with Johne’s disease in Scotland. Therefore, until the prevalence of Johne’s is better understood, the full economic cost to Scottish dairy herds remains uncertain but in the meantime the sensitivity analysis evaluates the robustness of economic welfare to such uncertainties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Market access for African livestock products has long been stymied by a variety of animal diseases endemic in the region. The concept of commodity-based trade (CBT) has been advanced to make trade dependent on process-related attributes of production that ensure freedom from disease rather than the geographical origin of the animals themselves. This article looks at the potential of CBT in improving market access for beef from communal areas of Namibia, which have historically been excluded from high-value export markets. Model results suggest only modest gains from CBT, given the substantial costs of compliance with SPS and quality standards required for high-value markets. Regional markets may still offer the best option for beef exports from these areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Market access for livestock products from Africa has traditionally been limited by the presence of certain infectious diseases that pose risks to animal and human health. However, an increasingly discussed option for widening that access is commodity-based trade (CBT) focusing on the health and safety attributes of the product rather than the disease status of the country of origin. There have, however, been few analyses on the potential economic impacts and unintended consequences of such an approach. This article examines the principles behind a dramatic shift in approach to trading opportunities that CBT might bring, exploring both technical and economic considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because many animal diseases have strong transboundary attributes, their control can be reasonably characterised as an international public good. The potential for reservoirs of transboundary diseases to persist in developing countries that lack the capacity or incentives to control them implies a need for international financial transfers to fund control. However, the costs of control can be large compared with development assistance budgets, and the benefits small compared with the global benefits of control and the local benefits of other priority investments. This article outlines a framework for setting priorities for international development assistance for animal disease control based on the incidence of market and non-market impacts and the context in which outbreaks take place in endemic and susceptible countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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