Economics Of Adult Booster Vaccination Against Bovine Brucellosis In The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

Download or read book Economics of Adult-booster Vaccination Against Bovine Brucellosis in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem written by Jessica L. Gordon and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bovine brucellosis is a bacterial disease (causative agent: Brucella abortus) endemic to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), which often causes abortion in infected cattle. Loss of calves and regulatory measures imposed to control disease outbreaks (namely quarantine) can have serious economic impacts on livestock producers. Implementing an adult-booster vaccination strategy could reduce some of the risks associated with the disease (i.e., reduce the number of abortions in cattle caused by brucellosis), but no studies have assessed the economic effectiveness of such a strategy. We combine an epidemiology model of intra-herd disease dynamics with ranch-level economic budgets to determine under what circumstances an adult-booster vaccination strategy could potentially generate positive expected net benefit for producers. We determine that, contingent on several modeling assumptions, administering an adult-booster may generate positive expected net benefit under specific circumstances. If a cattle herd’s risk of being exposed to the bacteria is high enough, then the expected cost of a brucellosis quarantine is large enough that even a modest decrease in the risk of being quarantined (i.e., the benefit of adult-booster) might outweigh the cost of administering an adult-booster to the herd. Achieving positive net benefits may depend, however, on whether a producer is already conducting annual whole-herd testing. The expected benefit of adult-booster has the potential to outweigh the cost under some circumstances, so producers in the GYE may want to consider this management strategy for their production system.