Global economic impacts of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza: A systematic review and impact framework

This research documents a systematic review of 85 studies across 27 countries of the the global economic impact of HPAI, developing a first-of-its-kind framework cataloguing 135 impact parameters across five sectors, and evaluated the cost-effectiveness of control strategies like vaccination and culling.

HPAI's financial toll is enormous and growing up to $3.9 billion in a single outbreak, comparable to the global cost of malaria, yet prior economic assessments have systematically underestimated the true burden by focusing only on direct costs like culling while ignoring market effects, public health consequences, environmental damage, and social harms. Low and middle income countires bear a disproportionate relative burden but have the least data, and weak outbreak control anywhere has global consequences. The framework gives policymakers the standardised, comprehensive tool needed to make better-informed, more equitable decisions, particularly urgent given that H5N1 has now reached dairy cattle and 108 countries, making pandemic risk higher than ever.