Locating the source of large-scale outbreaks of foodborne disease.

ABSTRACT: In today's globally interconnected food system, outbreaks of foodborne disease can spread widely and cause considerable impact on public health. We study the problem of identifying the source of emerging large-scale outbreaks of foodborne disease; a crucial step in mitigating their proliferation. To solve the source identification problem, we formulate a probabilistic model of the contamination diffusion process as a random walk on a network and derive the maximum-likelihood estimator for the source location. By modelling the transmission process as a random walk, we are able to develop a novel, computationally tractable solution that accounts for all possible paths of travel through the network. This is in contrast to existing approaches to network source identification, which assume that

SUBMITTER: Horn AL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6408345 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature