Abstract
Infectious diseases are often transmitted through local interactions. Yet, both surveillance and control measures are implemented within administrative units. Capturing local transmission processes and spatial coupling between regions from aggregate level data is therefore a technical challenge that can shed light on both theoretical questions and practical decisions. Fox rabies has been eliminated from much of Europe through oral rabies vaccination (ORV) programmes. The European Union (EU) co-finances ORV to maintain rabies freedom in EU member and border states via a cordon sanitaire. Models to capture local transmission dynamics and spatial coupling have immediate application to the planning of these ORV campaigns and to other parts of the world considering oral vaccination. We fitted a hierarchical Bayesian state-space model to data on three decades of fox rabies cases and ORV campaigns from Eastern Germany. Specifically, we find that (i) combining regional spatial coupling and heterogeneous local transmission allows us to capture regional rabies dynamics; (ii) incursions from other regions account for less than 1% of cases, but allow for re-emergence of disease; (iii) herd immunity achieved through bi-annual vaccination campaigns is short-lived due to population turnover. Together, these findings highlight the need for regular and sustained vaccination efforts and our modelling approach can be used to provide strategic guidance for ORV delivery. Moreover, we show that biological understanding can be gained from inference from partially observed data on wildlife disease.
Highlights
Disease dynamics are underpinned by the interplay between population connectivity and the localized nature of transmission [1,2,3,4]
Only aggregate data is available on the occurrence of infections, which makes it difficult to disentangle the extent to which disease dynamics are driven by local transmission versus spatial coupling between subpopulations
From the fitted parameters (95% highest posterior density [HPD] for h of 1.56–1.63; for ρmax of 0.010–0.032; for θ of 0.099–0.116; and τ of 596–791), we estimated that less than 8% of the fox population were infected by rabies annually and that incidence declined to zero within 5 years from the start of oral rabies vaccination (ORV) campaigns
Summary
Disease dynamics are underpinned by the interplay between population connectivity and the localized nature of transmission [1,2,3,4]. Many infectious diseases are transmitted primarily through local interactions, but control strategies and surveillance are implemented at coarser administrative scales. Only aggregate data is available on the occurrence of infections, which makes it difficult to disentangle the extent to which disease dynamics are driven by local transmission versus spatial coupling between subpopulations. Approaches that quantify these processes have potential to guide the efficient use of resources for disease control.
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