Economic and Social Justification of Investment in Animal Health and Zoonoses

 They reveal the limitations of analyses confined to direct or short-term effects, effectively ignoring the complex socioeconomic impacts of animal diseases, especially where they become globalised or affect public health. When they are analysed/calculated, indirect effects tend to be far greater than direct effects because they include (and sometimes combine) ‘ripple’ effects upstream and downstream of the affected commodity chain or chains, ‘spillover’ effects onto other sectors of the economy (such as tourism), ‘long-term’ effects (herd structure in species with a long reproduction cycle or endemic status of a disease), and ‘remote’ effects (on international markets in the products directly affected, as well as in substitution products). This would suggest that most of the figures cited in literature are much lower than in reality, and that the real effects are themselves severely underestimated.