An economic assessment of pseudorabies (Aujeszky’ disease) elimination on hog farms in China

Publication date: Available online 13 December 2018Source: Preventive Veterinary MedicineAuthor(s): Yumei Liu, Qihui Chen, Xudong Rao, Xinyu Diao, Lin Yang, Xiangming Fang, Henk HogeveenAbstractHog pseudorabies (Aujeszky’s disease) can incur serious losses for farm owners and even the entire hog industry by causing infertility, abortion, and stillbirth among sows, as well as diarrhoea, respiratory failure, and death among piglets. Pseudorabies virus could be prevented, controlled, and eliminated by clean-up at both farm and regional levels through a strict procedure of vaccination, quarantine, diagnosis, elimination of positive animals, and healthy animals nurturing. Using data from 63 large-scale hog farms from nine provinces (municipalities, autonomous regions) of China, we evaluated the economic consequences of hog pseudorabies clean-up in China’s hog farms based on a partial budgeting method. By comparing large-scale hog farms that have performed pseudorabies clean-up with similar farms that have not, we analysed how clean-up affected farm profit and whether there existed sufficient economic incentives for farm owners to adopt pseudorabies control measures. Further, we examined how the economic consequences varied with factors such as clean-up history and farm size. The findings showed that, on average, clean-up adopters outperformed non-adopters by 8.02 million yuan per farm per year within the four years post clean-up adoption. Also, we found that the net profit cha...
Source: Preventive Veterinary Medicine - Category: Veterinary Research Source Type: research