This is an ESRC funded CASE award part funded by the Welsh Assembly Government. The aim of the project is to look more closely at the social and economic impacts of TB. One of the reasons for this is that these impacts have some sort of cost, yet to date these costs have not been factored into any cost benefit analysis. Moreover, TB policy has come to revolve as much around a discourse of human suffering as it has a discourse of animal health and disease.
Normally these costs are said to be intangible and immeasurable. There are some methodologies, however, used in studies of occupational health that have tried to measure the impacts of stress, or what they call presenteeism - that is the cost of turning up to work when ill and not performing to one's full potential.
There has been some systematic work done on farmer stress (by Defra) but none in Wales. Much of this work has simply involved snapshot surveys rather than longitudinal analysis. Maggie Mort's work on FMD shows that the stress of animal disease can last along time. In my work, farmers often compared TB to cancer and FMD a heart attack. Understanding these long term effects, how they are distributed throughout farming families is a key aim of this study. It may also help to understand how advice to farmers can be better targetted.
The project will be using a survey of farmers in Wales to measure levels of stress and presenteeism in different TB context, along with some in-depth study of selected farmers.
No comments:
Post a Comment