Abstract
Globalization has increased the potential for the introduction and spread of novel pathogens over large spatial scales necessitating continental-scale disease models to guide emergency preparedness. Livestock disease spread models, such as those for the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) epidemic in the United Kingdom, represent some of the best case studies of large-scale disease spread. However, generalization of these models to explore disease outcomes in other systems, such as the United States’s cattle industry, has been hampered by differences in system size and complexity and the absence of suitable livestock movement data. Here, a unique database of US cattle shipments allows estimation of synthetic movement networks that inform a near-continental scale disease model of a potential FMD-like (i.e., rapidly spreading) epidemic in US cattle. The largest epidemics may affect over one-third of the US and 120,000 cattle premises, but cattle movement restrictions from infected counties, as opposed to national movement moratoriums, are found to effectively contain outbreaks. Slow detection or weak compliance may necessitate more severe state-level bans for similar control. Such results highlight the role of large-scale disease models in emergency preparedness, particularly for systems lacking comprehensive movement and outbreak data, and the need to rapidly implement multi-scale contingency plans during a potential US outbreak.
Highlights
Outbreaks of rapidly spreading infections in populations of livestock around the world can have far reaching economic impacts
A notable exception to this Interstate Certificate of Veterinary Inspection (ICVI) import requirement is cattle going directly to slaughter, these movements are less important for transmission dynamics
For all of the analyses described in this paper, 100 epidemics were seeded in each of the 3109 counties in turn to allow for an investigation of the impact of the precise location of the source of the outbreak upon the spread of disease
Summary
Outbreaks of rapidly spreading infections in populations of livestock around the world can have far reaching economic impacts. The 2001 epidemic in the UK was estimated to have cost £3.1 billion to agriculture with similar, associated losses to tourism [2]. With a cattle population that is nearly an order of magnitude larger than that in the UK, the potential impacts of a rapidly spreading disease like FMD on the US economy are staggering. Mechanistic models of the spread of an FMD-like disease in the US can help to mitigate these potential costs by providing robust explorations of the effects of scale and regionalization on potential surveillance and control measures. Retrospective models of the 2001 UK outbreak provide insights on the influence of premises and animal densities on spatial dynamics of transmission [3,4,5,6,7,8] and the utility of detailed animal movement information in prediction of longrange disease spread [9,10,11,12,13,14]
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