Analysing livestock network data for infectious disease control: an argument for routine data collection in emerging economies.

ABSTRACT: Livestock movements are an important mechanism of infectious disease transmission. Where these are well recorded, network analysis tools have been used to successfully identify system properties, highlight vulnerabilities to transmission, and inform targeted surveillance and control. Here we highlight the main uses of network properties in understanding livestock disease epidemiology and discuss statistical approaches to infer network characteristics from biased or fragmented datasets. We use a 'hurdle model' approach that predicts (i) the probability of movement and (ii) the number of livestock moved to generate synthetic 'complete' networks of movements between administrative wards, exploiting routinely collected government movement permit data from northern Tanzania. We demonstrate that

SUBMITTER: Chaters GL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6558568 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature