Sub-project 3 – March 2019

The SP3 team are currently analysing and interpreting the results from the first phase of simulations in alternative control strategies with vaccination, as well as planning the second phase of simulations on post-outbreak surveillance and management.

Early results from the first phase of simulations indicate there may be interesting differences in control strategies for spread scenarios in intensive production regions. These simulation scenarios, where statistically significant reductions in the number of infected premises and/or duration of an outbreak are found, will become the focus of the second phase of simulations. The team presented some of these results at the Australasian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society (AARES) annual conference on 14 February in Melbourne.

Late last year, the team held a workshop with researchers and emergency animal disease experts from AHA, AAHL/CSIRO and the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources, on the details of the logistics and testing anticipated during post-outbreak surveillance and management. This workshop helped provide the alternative approaches that will be compared during the second phase of the simulations. This workshop also identified some additional changes to the Australian Animal Disease Spread model (AADIS) to support this simulation study design.

The team have also been talking to industry stakeholders about trade recovery scenarios to support the economic analysis. In collaboration with ABARES, the subproject is analysing production and trade losses associated with the different spread scenarios and control strategies. The team are also building on past research by Ann Seitzinger and Philip Paarlberg to develop new modelling capacity to analyse impacts on industry, and we will start seeing results from this work in the second part of the year.