An economic evaluation of the control of three notifiable fish diseases in the United Kingdom

We summarised the challenges faced in an ex ante cost–benefit appraisal of United Kingdom government spending on disease surveillance for three notifiable fish diseases: infectious salmon anaemia (ISA), viral haemorrhagic septicaemia (VHS) and infectious haemorrhagic necrosis (IHN). We used a social cost–benefit analysis and adopted a national perspective. We compared costs of current public and private surveillance effort with the benefits stated in terms of the avoided private and social costs of potential disease outbreaks. Spending on ISA and VHS were predicted to be efficient; the benefit–cost ratios were always ≥3.2 for ISA and ≥5.8 for VHS for all nine scenarios examined for each infection. However, the benefit–cost ratio for IHN was predicted never to exceed 1.6, and was <1.0 in five of the nine scenarios-so spending on IHN would be harder to justify.