Professor Jonathan Rushton on the economics of animal health

Could you tell us about your educational background?

I grew up on a dairy farm in Lancashire, England, and saw a lot of animal health issues. I watched vets take blood samples and I applied anti-parasite treatments on the cattle. I did not know at the time that these were for the successful brucellosis and warble fly eradication programmes.

My first degree was in Natural Sciences at Cambridge, where I specialised in livestock production and animal nutrition. After that, I did a masters in Agricultural Economics at Reading. A year of that degree I spent in Bengaluru, India working in the veterinary epidemiology centre that has become the National Institute for Veterinary Epidemiology and Disease Informatics (NIVEDI). After my masters I joined the Veterinary Epidemiology and Economics Research Unit (VEERU) at the University of Reading, where I taught on their a veterinary epidemiology masters course, carried out consultancy work in Europe and Africa, and completed my PhD on the economics of smallholder dairy farming systems through simulation models.

Please can you summarise your career?

On completion of my PhD, I moved to Bolivia, to establish foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) surveillance. This meant I had to learn to speak, read and write in Spanish. We established a surveillance system that has contributed to Bolivia announcing this year their freedom from FMD with vaccination. After the UK funding ended, I remained in Bolivia setting up a consultancy company that offered contract research services and advice on the use of economics of animal health. 

In the 2000s, I returned to Europe to join the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. I led a global team working on the economics and social sciences of avian flu. In 2009, I joined the Royal Veterinary College, University of London to teach and do research. I established a network on the economics of animal health which has gone on to become the International Society for Economics and Social Sciences for Animal Health (ISESSAH). 

I moved to the University of Liverpool. The attraction was to continue to work on economics of animal health and to spend more time on the economics of food systems.  I initiated and led the Global Burden of Animal Diseases (GBADs) programme - an international consortium that is establishing a systematic approach to measures the economic and societal impact of animal diseases on people, livestock systems and economies. And this year I joined the Roslin where I continue to lead GBADs and work on the economics of animal health.

What made you relocate to Roslin?

This campus has the largest concentration of animal health and production science in Europe, and the University of Edinburgh is a world-leading institution. It offered the opportunity to be part of a larger animal health research community close to the science.

How can your work impact policy?

My work provides the evidence base that helps governments and organisations justify investment, prioritise diseases, and decide which interventions are worthwhile.

A key reason people commission cost benefit analysis of disease interventions is to advocate for resources to tackle diseases they believe are important. However, decisions also depend on broader priorities such as risk minimisation, food system stability, and economic effects. 

You’ve lived and worked in Asia, Europe, and South America. How has that shaped your perspective?

Global experiences highlight how interconnected everything is. A disease event in South America may seem irrelevant to Europe, but trade patterns mean pathogens can spread worldwide, and faster than ever before. 

The application of economics supports an understanding of how networks function and what role human behaviour has on disease introduction, spread and maintenance. What has been a constant feature of my animal health experiences in different countries is human behaviour is central to pathogen evolution, host genetics and the environment we keep animals. 

Have you taken knowledge or wisdom from Indigenous or local farming practices and applied them elsewhere?

One early example was during consultancy work on Newcastle disease - an infection affecting birds - in Ethiopia. I visited a woman near Addis Ababa who kept five chickens. I asked why she didn’t have more chickens, and she explained that more than 5 birds would destroy her garden because they would eat everything. It was a reminder that even in small systems, resource constraints limit livestock numbers. When people talk about increasing herd or flock sizes or making the animals bigger in size without considering feed and resource availability, it overlooks realities farmers face.

What recent findings would you like to explore further?

Within the GBADs work, we recently assessed the burden of animal disease in Ethiopia. A key challenge is the lack of reliable data to properly estimate disease burdens. 

Using available models, we estimated that improving livestock health nationwide could increase Ethiopia’s GDP by around half of the country’s current economic growth rate - a major impact. The major winners of improved animal health are consumers and food systems operators. Our work has shown that animal health investments benefit society as a whole, and has highlighted the need for greater investment.

Are there any common misconceptions you face in your work?

Many researchers and organisations assume I will produce a cost-benefit analysis that supports their preferred intervention, they do not expect negative outcomes from such analyses. Yet some of the most interesting and impactful results come out of negative cost benefit analyses. For example, I led a cost benefit analysis on Salmonella control in pigs in Europe. The European Commission expected a positive result, but our analysis showed it wasn’t beneficial at the time, it stopped people investing in something that at the time would have reduced the value of the pig sector and society as a whole. The negative result doesn’t mean the issue isn’t important, it may indicate the need for more research or better technology before field action.

What excites you most about the future of your field?

We recently had a breakthrough moment. Our GBADs partners in Guelph University, Canada, presented their data interface that links our modelling work to flexible dashboard outputs from the model runs. This interface allows us to use the GBADs technical guide for practical and accessible implementation of animal disease burden estimations. We want to use this as a basis to go from biological samples through to animal disease burden estimates linking the expertise and skills across Roslin and RDSVS. 

Being part of the Roslin Institute enables GBADs to integrate biological and disease data more seamlessly into economic impact work, improving how we advocate for research funding and prioritise disease interventions. It may take another 20 years to be fully functional, but the progress is encouraging.

If you weren’t a scientist or economist, what would you be doing?

Sometimes I wish I’d stayed in my hometown and perhaps become a carpenter. My wife and I also have a smallholding in Australia, and I’d like to end my days farming again.