Abstract
Controlling bovine tuberculosis (bTB) disease in cattle farms in England is seen as a challenge for farmers, animal health, environment and policy-makers. The difficulty in diagnosis and controlling bTB comes from a variety of factors: the lack of an accurate diagnostic test which is higher in specificity than the currently available skin test; isolation periods for purchased cattle; and the density of active badgers, especially in high-risk areas. In this paper, to enable the complex evaluation of bTB disease, a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) is designed with the help of domain experts and available historical data. A significant advantage of this approach is that it represents bTB as a dynamic process that evolves periodically, capturing the actual experience of testing and infection over time. Moreover, the model demonstrates the influence of particular risk factors upon the risk of bTB breakdown in cattle farms.
Highlights
The bTB is an incessant bacterial disease of cattle caused by M. bovis (Mycobacterium bovis) infection
A combination of the data-driven and knowledge-based approaches was utilised in our study for the construction and evaluation of the proposed dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) model
The emerging risk factors will be detected using the bottom-up inference in the proposed DBN [40]
Summary
The bTB is an incessant bacterial disease of cattle caused by M. bovis (Mycobacterium bovis) infection. BTB affects animal health and welfare, causes financial strain through involuntary culling and animal movement restrictions and incurs costs through control and eradication programs [2,3]. In England, the majority of bTB cases are reported in southwestern England and Wales which are considered to be high-risk areas. To control and annihilate bTB in these areas, a control program has been in place since 1947 consisting primarily of routine and targeted surveillance of cattle herds, culling of positively tested for bTB animals and movement restrictions on infected herds [4]. A new herd incident (NHI) or breakdown is declared when one or more animals in a herd have positive skin test results. The breakdown in a herd causes immediate animal movement limits, tentative termination of the official bTB
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