Abstract
Domestic dogs display complex roaming behaviours, which need to be captured to more realistically model the spread of rabies. We have previously shown that roaming behaviours of domestic dogs can be categorised as stay-at-home, roamer and explorer in the Northern Peninsular Area (NPA), Queensland, Australia. These roaming behaviours are likely to cause heterogeneous contact rates that influence the speed or pattern of rabies spread in a dog population. The aim of this study was to define contact spatial kernels using the overlap of individual dog utilisation distributions to describe the daily probability of contact between pairs of dogs exhibiting these three a priori roaming behaviours. We further aimed to determine if the kernels lead to different predicted rabies outbreaks (outbreak duration and number of rabid dogs) by incorporating the spatial kernels into a previously developed rabies spread model for the NPA. Spatial kernels created with both dogs in a pair being explorers or one dog explorer and one dog roamer (who roamed away from their residence) produced short but large outbreaks compared with spatial kernels with at least one stay-at-home dog. Outputs from this model incorporating heterogeneous contacts demonstrate how roaming behaviours influence disease spread in domestic dog populations.
Highlights
Rabies causes approximately 60 000 human deaths annually, 99% of which are caused by domestic dogs [1, 2]
The probability HR (PHR) overlap index was used to create six different spatial kernels to describe the heterogeneous contacts between dogs of the same and different roaming categories, which were previously characterised based on field GPS data [10]
Using these six spatial kernels, different rabies outbreaks in the Northern Peninsula Area (NPA) dog population were predicted with respect to outbreak duration and number of rabid dogs
Summary
Rabies causes approximately 60 000 human deaths annually, 99% of which are caused by domestic dogs [1, 2]. The annual probability that at least one rabid dog from Indonesia enters north-west Cape York Peninsula, which includes the communities of the Northern Peninsula Area (NPA), Queensland, via an illegal fishing boat and infects a resident NPA dog has been estimated to be 8.3 × 10−5 (standard error 1.4 × 10−4) per year [5]. This probability is due to the prevalence of rabies in Indonesia and the proximity of north-west Cape York Peninsula to Indonesia facilitating boat travel between the countries [5]. For model predictions to be accurate, knowledge of the underlying process of disease spread is needed so that it can be represented in the model structure
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