Abstract
Diseases that affect both wild and domestic animals can be particularly difficult to prevent, predict, mitigate, and control. Such multi-host diseases can have devastating economic impacts on domestic animal producers and can present significant challenges to wildlife populations, particularly for populations of conservation concern. Few mathematical models exist that capture the complexities of these multi-host pathogens, yet the development of such models would allow us to estimate and compare the potential effectiveness of management actions for mitigating or suppressing disease in wildlife and/or livestock host populations. We conducted a workshop in March 2014 to identify the challenges associated with developing models of pathogen transmission across the wildlife-livestock interface. The development of mathematical models of pathogen transmission at this interface is hampered by the difficulties associated with describing the host-pathogen systems, including: (1) the identity of wildlife hosts, their distributions, and movement patterns; (2) the pathogen transmission pathways between wildlife and domestic animals; (3) the effects of the disease and concomitant mitigation efforts on wild and domestic animal populations; and (4) barriers to communication between sectors. To promote the development of mathematical models of transmission at this interface, we recommend further integration of modern quantitative techniques and improvement of communication among wildlife biologists, mathematical modelers, veterinary medicine professionals, producers, and other stakeholders concerned with the consequences of pathogen transmission at this important, yet poorly understood, interface.
Highlights
Increasing human population growth, the subsequent increasing demand for food production, and the conversion of natural habitats to agricultural land uses have all altered interactions between domestic and wild animal populations.Historically, transmissions of pathogens from livestock to wildlife have led to the maintenance of introduced livestock diseases in wildlife populations for up to a century or more [1], and vice versa.More recently, the loss and alteration of wildlife habitats due to anthropogenic activities have resulted in changes to pathogen and host distributions that provide increased opportunities for interaction between wildlife and livestock hosts, leading to pathogen spillover [2]
A central focus of the group was to identify deficiencies in modeling transmission in livestock-wildlife disease systems using, as examples, foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), bovine tuberculosis (bTB), highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), and Classical Swine Fever (CSF); these diseases formed a foundation for discussion from which this broader paper emerged
The development of predictive models of disease outbreaks caused by multi-host pathogens is hampered by the difficulty in determining: (1) the identity of hosts and pathogens, their distributions, and movement patterns; (2) the transmission pathways and rates between wildlife and domestic animals; (3) the effects of disease caused by pathogens and concomitant disease mitigation efforts on wildlife and livestock populations; and (4) barriers to communication among these sectors
Summary
Increasing human population growth, the subsequent increasing demand for food production (including increased meat and animal product consumption), and the conversion of natural habitats to agricultural land uses have all altered interactions between domestic and wild animal populations. Unique challenges are posed when modeling wildlife diseases due to the relative paucity of information on wildlife compared to humans or domestic animals [23] Host characteristics such as social structure, movement patterns, population numbers, and contact networks, which are vital aspects for capturing the potential spread of pathogens and the impacts of the emerging infectious diseases they cause [24,25,26,27], are more difficult to observe for wildlife species. The need for approaches to disease management that draw together expertise from across disciplines—transdisciplinarity—is ever-increasing, a lack of effective communication and collaboration among various scientists and stakeholders, such as veterinary scientists, wildlife biologists, vector and microbiologists, statisticians, livestock owners, and managers, persists This apparent continued segregation of disciplines exacerbates the difficulties of modeling diseases at the interface [29]
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