Case studies // Prevent, detect, respond: Can animal health innovation move faster than disease?

Disease can spread faster than systems can contain it, causing animal losses, movement restrictions, and market disruption. Prevention, diagnostics, and disease-resistant technologies are advancing, but approval processes, fragmented surveillance, and difficult deployment can delay action until losses have already begun. From farm-level prevention to new world screwworm, where can industry and regulators move faster, and which investments should producers fund and which should be funded collectively across the wider system?

1. Prevention: Did earlier investment reduce the cost of disease?
Did vaccination, genetics, nutrition, biosecurity, or antimicrobial stewardship prevent enough loss to justify acting before clinical problems emerged?

2. Detection: Did earlier warning change the outcome?
Did point-of-care diagnostics, sensors, or digital surveillance identify a threat early enough to improve health, performance, or containment, or did false alerts, slow results, and weak workflows undermine the return?

3. Response: Can new world screwworm be contained at scale?
Can surveillance, sterile-insect capacity, animal-movement data, and cross-border coordination hold the line, and can producers report suspected cases without carrying disproportionate financial risk?