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Quantifying Experts’ Uncertainty About the Future Cost of Exotic Diseases
Author(s) -
Gosling John Paul,
Hart Andy,
Mouat David C.,
Sabirovic Mirzet,
Scanlan Simon,
Simmons Alick
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
risk analysis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.972
H-Index - 130
eISSN - 1539-6924
pISSN - 0272-4332
DOI - 10.1111/j.1539-6924.2011.01704.x
Subject(s) - government (linguistics) , outbreak , livestock , expert elicitation , business , infectious disease (medical specialty) , public economics , economics , disease , geography , medicine , philosophy , linguistics , pathology , virology , meteorology , forestry
Since the foot‐and‐mouth disease outbreak of 2001 in the United Kingdom, there has been debate about the sharing, between government and industry, both the costs of livestock disease outbreaks and responsibility for the decisions that give rise to them. As part of a consultation into the formation of a new body to manage livestock diseases, government veterinarians and economists produced estimates of the average annual costs for a number of exotic infectious diseases. In this article, we demonstrate how the government experts were helped to quantify their uncertainties about the cost estimates using formal expert elicitation techniques. This has enabled the decisionmakers to have a greater appreciation of government experts’ uncertainty in this policy area.