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Prevention and control of animal diseases worldwide
Part I: Economic analysis: prevention versus outbreak costs
7. Conclusions
It is difficult to predict the severity of the threats posed by Transboundary Animal Diseases (TADs).
Moreover, different issues arise depending on the nature of the disease. A disease such as HPAI, with its
high public health relevance, poses a different set of challenges than a disease such as FMD which has
purely commercial and socio-economic implications. Both diseases, however, have the potential to lead to
substantial and even devastating consequences in terms of increased poverty, decreases in food security
and social equity/stability in developing/transition countries.
At the same time, the current state of Veterinary Services (VS) and preparedness levels in
developing/transition countries pose a real and present threat to the prevention and control of TADs. As is
demonstrated in the case studies and from the literature review, the various identified weaknesses
essentially revolve around the key issue of the lack of funds and/or poor governance. Within a weaker
economic environment and while these countries are struggling to catch up with the rest of the world, it is
evident that VS have not been – more importantly have not consistently been – a priority in the use of
relatively constrained public funds. Today more than ever, with increasing globalisation, the world’s
‘developed’ and ‘developing/transition’ countries are so interconnected that both the effects of TADs and
the measures to prevent them can not be viewed in isolation. This call for a global approach in the fight
against animal diseases, for which there is wide consensus in the reviewed literature that the VS have a
crucial role to play as the providers of Global Public Goods.
In the case of HPAI, while significant risk remains that the virus mutates to infect humans, as yet
adaptation for human-to-human transmission has not occurred. However, the WHO considers it a probable
(rather than a possible) scenario, and the key competent agencies for animal health (OIE/FAO) warn that
the greater the shedding of virus from infected poultry the greater the risk of adaptation leading to a
human pandemic. It is therefore clear that the disease must be contained efficiently and within a
reasonable time frame. This being a transboundary disease, efficient containment can not take place unless
all countries in the world are prepared to face a possible outbreak. The worldwide system for the
prevention and control of HPAI can only be as strong as its weakest link. To date, the H5N1 has been
most prevalent in SE Asia but it has spread relatively quickly to Africa and has made its appearance in the
developed world (more recently with the February 2007 UK outbreak).
This raises important strategic questions for policy-makers around the world. A key issue is the extent of
the investment that needs to be undertaken to improve current systems to prevent TADs, not only in the
specific context of the two diseases examined here (HPAI and FMD) but also more generally.
To determine the appropriate level of investment, in purely economic terms, demands an analysis of the
costs of the investment versus the benefits. As discussed in the Report, such an analysis in the strict sense
of a CBA methodology has a number of limitations:
• Firstly, this theme requires both detailed epidemiological and economic modelling, for which
neither the methodology has been adequately developed nor the necessary data exists.
• Second, in most cases, both the costs and the benefits extend beyond the boundaries of a specific
disease. The interrelationships may be too complex to allow clear modelling. For example,
general improvements in VS have implications for all diseases, in which case the resulting
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