Costs and Benefits of endemic disease control
One of the core features of the Animal Health and Welfare Strategy is the need to support farmer decision-making and to identify the contribution that improved animal health and welfare status can make to farm business viability.
Endemic disease in farm-animals results in reduced production efficiency, economic performance and animal welfare. However, the cost of particular sheep and cattle diseases needs to be quantified to compare their relative importance and to assess the costs and benefits of particular disease prevention and control strategies. Such information would be particularly useful to those farmers involved in the AHWM Programme, helping to inform discussions at the annual review of the AHWM Plan on which of those diseases present on farm to focus on.
In 2003 SEERAD commissioned SAC to review existing information on Costs and Benefits. This report highlighted a lack of consistency between the methods used for calculating costs in previous studies and proposed a more practical way of measuring the costs of disease that might be adopted; avoidable losses. This takes into account the fact that investment in disease control may not mean that all output losses due to disease are avoided and that for most animal diseases the law of diminishing returns applies to expenditure on control.
Following on from this review, from early 2006, SEERAD has been funding research at SAC and Moredun Research Institute that closely links work on disease, epidemiology and economics. This aims to identify the best ways to invest in sheep disease prevention and control under particular farm circumstances and to help direct and focus research into improved control strategies. The ultimate aim of the work is the development of a decision support tool applicable across existing and emerging diseases that will help farmers to identifying the appropriate level of action required for disease control.
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