Economic impacts of avian influenza disease control strategies in the USA due to Texas outbreaks

Abstract

We compared the economic consequences of imposing quarantine with and without adding vaccination in controlling avian influenza (AI) outbreaks. We evaluated the benefits using a partial equilibrium, US agricultural sector model and found that the strategies were not significantly different in their benefits if consumer demand was not reduced by concerns over the outbreak. However, we did find impacts differed when the outbreak was associated with a consumer demand reduction. Specifically, under a scenario where consumers reduced demand by 20%, the quarantine with vaccination strategy was found to dominate the quarantine only strategy. In contrast, we found the quarantine only strategy was relatively more cost-effective when there was no demand reduction.