Abstract
African swine fever (ASF) is a contagious haemorrhagic fever that affects both domesticated and wild pigs. Since ASF reached Europe wild boar populations have been a reservoir for the virus. Collecting reliable data on infected individuals in wild populations is challenging, and this makes it difficult to deploy an effective eradication strategy. However, for diseases with high lethality rate, infected carcasses can be used as a proxy for the number of infected individuals at a certain time. Then R0 parameter can be used to estimate the time distribution of the number of newly infected individuals for the outbreak. We estimated R0 for two ASF outbreaks in wild boar, in Czech Republic and Belgium, using the exponential growth method. This allowed us to estimate both R0 and the doubling time (Td) for those infections. The results are R0 = 1.95, Td = 4.39 for Czech Republic and R0 = 1.65, Td = 6.43 for Belgium. We suggest that, if estimated as early as possible, R0 and Td can provide an expected course for the infection against which to compare the actual data collected in the field. This would help to assess if passive surveillance is properly implemented and hence to verify the efficacy of the applied control measures.
Highlights
African swine fever (ASF) is a contagious haemorrhagic fever that affects both domesticated and wild pigs
The aim of the present paper is to estimate both doubling time and R0 from the data obtained during the epidemics observed in Czech Republic and in Belgium
Data about PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) positive wild boar carcasses have been collected for two infected areas, one in Czech Republic (Zlin area, n = 191), and one in Belgium (Virton Forest, n = 280)
Summary
African swine fever (ASF) is a contagious haemorrhagic fever that affects both domesticated and wild pigs. ASF was introduced in Georgia in 2007 [1] and from there, in about a decade, it spread to other Caucasian and Eastern European countries [2] and to a large part of Eurasia including Southeast. The only strategy to limit the spread of the disease is to isolate the infected area. Stamping out of infected domestic pigs is planned and, in some cases, a preventive depopulation has been implemented in the whole infected area. The disease itself and the control measures cause large economic losses to the pig industry of any infected country [4]. The control/eradication of ASF becomes even more difficult when wild boar is involved, as occurred in several European
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