Chalmers Conferences, 9th European Conference on Mathematical and Theoretical Biology

Modeling animal disease spread: including several paths of disease spread in a bayesian data-driven approach
Uno Wennergren

Last modified: 2014-06-09

Abstract


Contributors: Peter Brommesson, Tom Lindström, Annie JonssonThe spread of animal disease between farms mainly occurs through the movement of animals between farms or by a local diffusion like process. This diffusion process is known to consist of several separate modes – ranging from wind spread to veterinarians visiting the farms. We will show how such a process interacts with the process governed with animal movement. We will present examples from US, UK, Sweden, and Italy. We will also show the effect of movement to slaughterhouses and when including markets in the movement process. Sweden do not use markets in the national movement structure while the other countries does. By using a Bayesian approach to analyze data on movements one can include the uncertainty given in the data throughout the model and display it in the simulation results. We will also show how to scale up partial datasets as in the US case. The Bayesian modeling may also include a hierarchical approach to include for example both distance dependence and classes of farms. The classes can be size of farm or production type. We also present some analysis of movement differences between seasons and regions.