Veterinary Epidemiology and Zoonosis

INTRODUCTION

• Animal health economics deals with the following aspects are 
  • Quantifying the economic effects of animal disease
  • Developing methods for optimizing decisions when individual animals, herds or populations are affected
  • Determining the profitability of specific disease control and health management programmes and procedures.
• Economics is a science, which illuminates how people exercise choice in the allocation of scarce resources for production, in the distribution and consumption of products and in the consequences of those decisions for individual and social benefit. Animal disease therefore has economic, as well as biological impacts because it affects the well-being of people.
• Economic analysis is frequently concerned with identification of the optimum level of output in relation to total resource use, and the most efficient combination of resources with in that total.
• The criteria for efficiency are both economic and technical.
• Generally, disease in domesticated (and sometimes undomesticated) livestock populations reduces the quantity and quality of livestock products available for human consumption (i.e., benefit).
• Examples of such products range from meat and milk to pony rides and the companionship of pets.
• Disease increases costs in two ways, are:
  • First, because resources are being used inefficiently, the products actually obtained are for an unnecessarily high resource cost, in the absence of disease, the same (or more) output could be obtained for a smaller (or the same) expenditure of resources.
  • Secondly, there is a cost to people, who are deprived because they have fewer, or lower quality products to consume: that is, they obtain lower benefits.
  • In summary, disease increases expenditures (production costs) and decreases output (consumer benefits).