Livestock disease management for trading across different regulatory regimes

TY - JOUR

T1 - Livestock disease management for trading across different regulatory regimes

AU - Bate, Andrew Matthew

AU - Jones, Glyn

AU - Kleczkowski, Adam

AU - Naylor, Rebecca Frances

AU - Timmis, Jonathan Ian

AU - White, Piran Crawfurd Limond

AU - Touza, Julia M.

N1 - Funding Information: This work was funded by NSF Grant 1414374 as part of the joint NSF-NIHUSDA Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases program and by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Grant BB/M008894/ 1. The authors are grateful to John Elliot (ADAS) and Gareth Hateley (APHA) for providing advice on cattle husbandry and BVD, which informed the structure of the model and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments. Publisher Copyright: © 2018, The Author(s).

PY - 2018/6/1

Y1 - 2018/6/1

N2 - The maintenance of livestock health depends on the combined actions of many different actors, both within and across different regulatory frameworks. Prior work recognised that private risk management choices have the ability to reduce the spread of infection to trading partners. We evaluate the efficiency of farmers’ alternative biosecurity choices in terms of their own-benefits from unilateral strategies and quantify the impact they may have in filtering the disease externality of trade. We use bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD) in England and Scotland as a case study, since this provides an example of a situation where contrasting strategies for BVD management occur between selling and purchasing farms. We use an agent-based bioeconomic model to assess the payoff dependence of farmers connected by trade but using different BVD management strategies. We compare three disease management actions: test-cull, test-cull with vaccination and vaccination alone. For a two-farm trading situation, all actions carried out by the selling farm provide substantial benefits to the purchasing farm in terms of disease avoided, with the greatest benefit resulting from test-culling with vaccination on the selling farm. Likewise, unilateral disease strategies by purchasers can be effective in reducing disease risks created through trade. We conclude that regulation needs to balance the trade-off between private gains from those bearing the disease management costs and the positive spillover effects on others.

AB - The maintenance of livestock health depends on the combined actions of many different actors, both within and across different regulatory frameworks. Prior work recognised that private risk management choices have the ability to reduce the spread of infection to trading partners. We evaluate the efficiency of farmers’ alternative biosecurity choices in terms of their own-benefits from unilateral strategies and quantify the impact they may have in filtering the disease externality of trade. We use bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD) in England and Scotland as a case study, since this provides an example of a situation where contrasting strategies for BVD management occur between selling and purchasing farms. We use an agent-based bioeconomic model to assess the payoff dependence of farmers connected by trade but using different BVD management strategies. We compare three disease management actions: test-cull, test-cull with vaccination and vaccination alone. For a two-farm trading situation, all actions carried out by the selling farm provide substantial benefits to the purchasing farm in terms of disease avoided, with the greatest benefit resulting from test-culling with vaccination on the selling farm. Likewise, unilateral disease strategies by purchasers can be effective in reducing disease risks created through trade. We conclude that regulation needs to balance the trade-off between private gains from those bearing the disease management costs and the positive spillover effects on others.

KW - Co-operation

KW - Disease management

KW - Endemic disease

KW - Externality

KW - Livestock

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85041903483&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s10393-018-1312-y

DO - 10.1007/s10393-018-1312-y

M3 - Article

SN - 1612-9202

VL - 15

SP - 302

EP - 316

JO - Ecohealth

JF - Ecohealth

IS - 2

ER -