Basic framework for the economic evaluation of animal health control programmes

The further integration of international markets means that co-ordinated policies against contagious animal infections have become increasingly important, and stricter demands for control and eradication should be expected in the future. To meet these demands, it would be desirable to create a computer simulation environment in which 'what if?' scenarios could be performed, in order to explore the epidemiological and economic effects of various infections and control strategies. The authors propose a flexible economic framework and illustrate this framework with an example. The framework has four elements: changes in the percentage of infectious herds, changes in product quantities, changes in product prices and economic integration. Each element is specifically defined and has its own input and output data, depending on the control strategy under consideration. In an illustration of the framework, probability distributions of the different control strategies are compared and the optimal strategy is chosen, according to the attitude of the decision-maker towards risk. Such a framework can be considered as a new standardised approach for comparing and selecting animal health control strategies, by integrating technical and economic data and principles.