A pre-SVEPM conference workshop will take place in Ghent, Belgium on Wednesday 25th March 2015. The workshop will deal with the economics of animal health and will be organised by Erwin Wauters, Jef Van Meensel (Institute for Agricultural and Fisheries Research – Social Sciences Unit) and Johannes Charlier (Ghent University – Department of Virology, Parasitology and Immunology). Both institutes are NEAT partner institutes.
What is the economic cost of an animal disease? What are the most cost-effective intervention strategies? What is the value of monitoring animal health? Why do animal health problems cause a loss in profitability? Does a gain in production always lead to a gain in profitability? Veterinarians, epidemiologists and animal production professionals are increasingly challenged to consider the economic aspects of their work. Indeed, decisions about animal health and production are subject to resource scarcity and budget constraints. Hence, economic evaluation frameworks are needed to provide guidelines for optimal decision making. This workshop will introduce participants into the field of animal health economics. At the end of the workshop, participants are expected to have a more clear understanding of economic principles guiding decision in animal health management. Further, participants are expected to have gained hands-on experience into the most basic and common methods for the economic analysis of animal health problems.
The workshop will first give a brief introduction about the basic questions and concepts of economics and the way economic thinking about animal health problems needs to be done. After this, several concepts and associated methods/tools will be presented. The content focusses on production diseases, i.e., diseases with direct and indirect impact on production, farm economics and animal welfare. The participants will be guided through some exercises, to be done in smaller groups, to get some hand-on experiences with basic tools and methods. The session will end with a general outro and feedback round.
Registration to the workshop is free of charge for people who register for the SVEPM conference. For more information and to register, visit http://svepm2015.be/Welcome.html
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