2294 part 1 final report.pdf - Agra CEAS Consulting

Prevention and control of animal diseases worldwide
Part I: Economic analysis: prevention versus outbreak costs
outbreak (infection rate: 20%; population mortality rate: 0.1%; equivalent to 3 million people dead) with
limited demand shocks (serious impact for 2 quarters of the year). Exporting economies such as
Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Chine would be particularly affected. In the second scenario, when the
impact is of longer duration (4 quarters) and demand shocks spread to the rest of the world, the estimated
loss to the region could be $283 billion (or 6.5% of GDP), resulting in cutback in Asia's GDP growth to
0.1% (global GDP could also contract by 0.6%).
According to analysis by Oxford Economic Forecasting, a flu outbreak would almost inevitably be global
and this not only multiplies the losses around the world but would add a large “trade multiplier effect” as
well, so that the costs would be more than a simple multiple of SARS. A likely minimum economic cost
of a serious global pandemic flu outbreak is estimated at 1% of world GDP or about $400billion. Under
reasonable assumptions over the duration, attack rates and mortality rates of a flu pandemic, the annual
cost could easily rise to more than 5% of world GDP, representing losses of about $2 trillion per annum.
(A210)
It is possible to quantify the impact of zoonotic diseases on human health in terms of disability adjusted
life years (DALYs 93 ), as is currently done by the WHO for a range of diseases of zoonotic potential. From
such an analysis useful conclusions can be drawn with regard to the cost-effectiveness of using different
control strategies to avert the burden of diseases. However, the paucity of basic epidemiological
information on zoonotic diseases is a major constraint to making quantitative assessments of their relative
importance, in public health terms, in different areas of the developing world (A19).
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Our analysis in this section leads us to the following conclusions:
93 The DALY takes into account both premature death and morbidity/disability and it considers the years of life lost
(YLLs) and the years of life lived with disability (YLDs). It is extensively used to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of
medical interventions to improve health so as to determine the priority of the different actions and the use of public
health budgets (A49).
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