Effects of regional differences and demography in modelling foot-and-mouth disease in cattle at the national scale.

ABSTRACT: Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a fast-spreading viral infection that can produce large and costly outbreaks in livestock populations. Transmission occurs at multiple spatial scales, as can the actions used to control outbreaks. The US cattle industry is spatially expansive, with heterogeneous distributions of animals and infrastructure. We have developed a model that incorporates the effects of scale for both disease transmission and control actions, applied here in simulating FMD outbreaks in US cattle. We simulated infection initiating in each of the 3049 counties in the contiguous US, 100 times per county. When initial infection was located in specific regions, large outbreaks were more likely to occur, driven by infrastructure and other demographic attributes such as premises clusteri

SUBMITTER: Tsao K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6936011 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature