References
An evaluation of the cost of companion animal parasitic zoonoses in Europe
Abstract
This article explores issues around the cost of small animal parasitic zoonoses. The concept of using disability adjusted life years (DALYs) is introduced, as used by the World Health Organisation (WHO), as a measure of the human cost of a wide variety of diseases. There are problems with ascertaining accurate figures for the numbers of humans affected, particularly where there is no mandatory reporting of infections. The WHO has calculated global figures for some infections including echinococcosis and leishmaniosis, which shows them to be important causes of disease, ranking collectively alongside diseases such as tooth decay or tetanus. The responsibility for control is sometimes grasped by governmental organizations, on other occasions responsibility falls to non-governmental organizations and individuals to ensure that measures to protect both animals and humans are in place. This is the case, for example, with tick control in travelling pets following the removal of mandatory tick treatment for pets returning to the UK. While there is no formal system for measuring the cost of disease in companion animals in a similar way to DALYs, the cost of treatment for affected animals can be estimated.
This article seeks to provide a ‘helicopter view’ or overview of the impact of companion animal parasitic zoonoses as causes of human disease, and demonstrates that several of the infections contribute substantially to the burden of human disease globally. Responsibility for reducing as far as possible the risk to humans, and to pets where they too are clinically affected by the infections, is sometimes undertaken by governmental organizations but often falls to individuals. Hence an individual pet owner’s decisions can have an impact, however small, on the global burden of human and animal disease.
The impact of companion animal parasitic zoonoses can be evaluated in a number of ways, one of which is to assess the cost of infection and to compare this with the costs and feasibility of prevention in both the human and the animal host. In humans the cost of infection can be formally described in ‘disability adjusted life years’ (DALYs), defined as the sum of years of potential life lost due to premature mortality and the years of productive life lost due to disability (Murray et al, 1994). This system has been used by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to allow assessment of the impact of an infection and comparison of one infection with another. It has been used in a wide range of infections including, for example, malaria, to rank the relative importance of infections by creating an annual global DALYs burden for each disease (World Health Organisation, 2012).
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