Quantifying the Value of Perfect Information in Emergency Vaccination Campaigns

PLoS Comput Biol. 2017 Feb 16;13(2):e1005318. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005318. eCollection 2017 Feb.

Abstract

Foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks in non-endemic countries can lead to large economic costs and livestock losses but the use of vaccination has been contentious, partly due to uncertainty about emergency FMD vaccination. Value of information methods can be applied to disease outbreak problems such as FMD in order to investigate the performance improvement from resolving uncertainties. Here we calculate the expected value of resolving uncertainty about vaccine efficacy, time delay to immunity after vaccination and daily vaccination capacity for a hypothetical FMD outbreak in the UK. If it were possible to resolve all uncertainty prior to the introduction of control, we could expect savings of £55 million in outbreak cost, 221,900 livestock culled and 4.3 days of outbreak duration. All vaccination strategies were found to be preferable to a culling only strategy. However, the optimal vaccination radius was found to be highly dependent upon vaccination capacity for all management objectives. We calculate that by resolving the uncertainty surrounding vaccination capacity we would expect to return over 85% of the above savings, regardless of management objective. It may be possible to resolve uncertainty about daily vaccination capacity before an outbreak, and this would enable decision makers to select the optimal control action via careful contingency planning.

MeSH terms

  • Animal Culling / economics*
  • Animal Culling / statistics & numerical data
  • Animals
  • Cost-Benefit Analysis / economics*
  • Emergency Medical Services / economics
  • Emergency Medical Services / statistics & numerical data
  • Foot-and-Mouth Disease / economics*
  • Foot-and-Mouth Disease / epidemiology
  • Foot-and-Mouth Disease / prevention & control*
  • Health Care Costs / statistics & numerical data*
  • Immunization Programs / economics*
  • Immunization Programs / statistics & numerical data
  • Mass Vaccination / economics
  • Mass Vaccination / statistics & numerical data
  • Population Surveillance / methods
  • Prevalence
  • Risk Assessment / economics
  • Risk Assessment / methods
  • United Kingdom / epidemiology
  • Viral Vaccines / economics
  • Viral Vaccines / therapeutic use

Substances

  • Viral Vaccines