Abstract
Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a highly contagious and economically important viral disease of cloven-hoofed animals. Australia's freedom from FMD underpins a valuable trade in live animals and animal products. An outbreak of FMD would result in the loss of export markets and cause severe disruption to domestic markets. The prevention of, and contingency planning for, FMD are of key importance to government, industry, producers and the community. The spread and control of FMD is complex and dynamic due to a highly contagious multi-host pathogen operating in a heterogeneous environment across multiple jurisdictions. Epidemiological modelling is increasingly being recognized as a valuable tool for investigating the spread of disease under different conditions and the effectiveness of control strategies. Models of infectious disease can be broadly classified as: population-based models that are formulated from the top-down and employ population-level relationships to describe individual-level behaviour, individual-based models that are formulated from the bottom-up and aggregate individual-level behaviour to reveal population-level relationships, or hybrid models which combine the two approaches into a single model. The Australian Animal Disease Spread (AADIS) hybrid model employs a deterministic equation-based model (EBM) to model within-herd spread of FMD, and a stochastic, spatially-explicit agent-based model (ABM) to model between-herd spread and control. The EBM provides concise and computationally efficient predictions of herd prevalence and clinical signs over time. The ABM captures the complex, stochastic and heterogeneous environment in which an FMD epidemic operates. The AADIS event-driven hybrid EBM/ABM architecture is a flexible, efficient and extensible framework for modelling the spread and control of disease in livestock on a national scale. We present an overview of the AADIS hybrid approach and a description of the model's epidemiological capabilities
Highlights
An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in Australia would have a major economic and social impact
These outputs demonstrate the potential of Animal Disease Spread (AADIS) as a training tool that provides various visualizations of disease transmission, and contrasts a disease manager’s incomplete view of an outbreak, with the physical reality
Concluding Remarks Disease managers have to take into account technical, sociopolitical, economic and logistical issues when developing policies for disease control
Summary
An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in Australia would have a major economic and social impact. This includes disruption of the domestic market for livestock and products, loss. These include: what control measures to adopt; trade and economic implications of different control measures; how to manage resources such as personnel, equipment and vaccine; access to appropriate technology such as diagnostic tools; animal welfare issues; consumer concerns, and possible public health ramifications (Garner et al, 2007). Models are especially useful when a country has not recently experienced the disease of concern (Bates et al, 2003b), for example, the last outbreak of FMD in Australia occurred in 1872 (Bunn et al, 1998)
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