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Institute of Epidemiology (IfE)

Working group Animal Health Economics

From an economic point of view, animal diseases play an important role in agriculture because of the animal losses in the case of an outbreak, the costs of control measures and trade restrictions. Control measures in livestock production have in recent years been critically discussed, in particular in respect to the chances and risks of vaccination and to alternatives for culling. Analyses of the economic damage caused by and animal disease, the cost and benefit of its control are in this context of increasing importance for agriculture, politics, trade, consumer protection and animal welfare.

The Working Group Animal Health Economics at the Institute of Epidemiology of the FLI examines animal diseases and measures implemented to control them from an economic point of view. To this end, retrospective analyses of outbreaks as well as prospective studies are carried out to plan control measures under cost/benefit aspects.

For Download

Excel spreadsheet (XLSX, 22 KB)

The Excel spreadsheet will assist you in estimating the gross margin of a dairy cow including the potential effect of a specific disease. The template is completed with exemplary values. You can change the values for the different parameters according to your situation. The gray cells will be automatically calculated and updated.

Example: If a specific disease reduces the milk yield from 7,300 to 7,220 kg/cow/ year, than the output for sold milk will be reduced from 2,011 to 1,989 Euros.

Shiny App:

The app helps you to estimate the gross margin for a dairy cow under the influence of a specific disease. In order to allow fluctuations in the input variables, both simple values as well as distributions can be specified. Values are then drawn at random from these distributions. To do this, it must be specified how many values are to be drawn (iterations).

Results and raw data can be exported to Excel or csv.

https://shiny.fli.de/ife-apps/GM_dairy/