PhD: The economic burden of HPAI and multi-criteria policy-supporting assessment of poultry vaccination
About the Opportunity
HPAI affects poultry productions in different ways depending on how poultry are managed and which products the production systems the birds are kept in produce. There will also be differences related to the market structures the poultry producers rely on for key inputs and outputs. The PhD will take these differences into account when assessing HPAI burden and how this relates to options for disease control. The main focus will be options for vaccination. The study will be interdisciplinary linking to epidemiology, production system analysis and social sciences with a strong emphasis on understanding and application of economic theory and tools. The selected candidate will complete their PhD with powerful understanding of how to approach the economic assessment of livestock diseases and their control. They will have a basis for working in future One Health and Animal Health programmes and projects.
The overall objective of the PhD project is to understand and evaluate the implication of vaccination on resource efficiency (economic burden) of poultry systems affected by HPAI. In particular, the project will:
1) Establish the economic burden of HPAI for a select number of production systems in order to understand the differences in resource use and outputs;
2) Develop an economic assessment of HPAI vaccination that will determine critical decision-making points and measure the risk associated with these points; and
3) Develop a multicriteria policy supporting framework to compare the various burdens of HPAI based upon the weighing of European HPAI decision makers.
In selected poultry production systems, it is expected that the study will estimate the economic burden of HPAI outbreaks at the individual farms level, under current legislation, private standards and biosecurity is assessed using data from veterinary officials and farmers. The relative contribution of the HPAI burden to the overall animal health losses in each system will be made using methods developed by the Global Burden of Animal Diseases programme (refer the GBADs technical guide). Focus will be given on the distribution of the economic effects over the stakeholders in the value chain (e.g., farmers, slaughterhouses, government). This will provide a baseline scenario for the economic assessment of poultry vaccination for each identified poultry system. Here, we will gather data on costs of vaccination, probability of HPAI being introduced (as based on results from DC9), and unintended losses due to vaccination as well as duration of protection of the vaccine against clinical disease effects. The analysis encompass uncertainty to understand the level of risks involved with vaccine decision making. Presentation of information will be in the form of cost-effectiveness and -benefit analysis within a decision tree analysis. Finally, the results of these economic burden estimations will be combined with the environmental and animal welfare burden estimates from an associated PhD into a multicriteria policy supporting framework. The framework will be parameterized for a number of approaches towards the control of HPAI and weighed based upon questionnaires send to European HPAI decision makers such as Chief Veterinary Officers and leaders in the private sector.
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