Abstract
Animal movement networks are essential in understanding and containing the spread of infectious diseases in farming industries. Due to its confidential nature, movement data for the US swine farming population is not readily available. Hence, we propose a method to generate such networks from limited data available in the public domain. As a potentially devastating candidate, we simulate the spread of African swine fever virus (ASFV) in our generated network and analyze how the network structure affects the disease spread. We find that high in-degree farm operations (i.e., markets) play critical roles in the disease spread. We also find that high in-degree based targeted isolation and hypothetical vaccinations are more effective for disease control compared to other centrality-based mitigation strategies. The generated networks can be made more robust by validation with more data whenever more movement data will be available.
Highlights
Animal movement networks are important to model disease outbreaks and identify the pathways of disease spread
The contributions of this paper are several: i) we propose a swine movement network generator, ii) we run African swine fever virus (ASFV) epidemic simulations and compare how different farm operation types affect the outbreak dynamics, and iii) we analyze and compare the effectiveness of multiple centrality based targeted control measures
We have proposed a method to generate movement networks from available data on the US swine industry, where we have utilized movement network characteristics available for two counties in Minnesota
Summary
Animal movement networks are important to model disease outbreaks and identify the pathways of disease spread. Epidemiologists and other researchers who need such data have to rely on models that can disaggregate available county or state level data. One such example is the work of Burdett et al, who developed a simulation model to quantify pig population and generate geolocation of individual farms [1]. This model does not produce movement data. Pig level networks in the US swine industry are not readily available for simulating disease outbreaks.
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