Abstract
Moving infected animals and sharing contaminated vehicles are considered as the most potent ways for between-farm disease transmission. The objective of this study is to develop a network-based simulation model to investigate the effects of direct contact, indirect contact, and their combination on a hypothetical foot-and-mouth disease spreading between beef-cattle farms in southwest Kansas, US, and explore the effect of different types of information-sharing networks on preventing the disease spreading. Based on synthetic cattle and truck movement data in southwest Kansas, we build a farm-level contact network with three layers, a cattle movement layer (direct contact), a truck movement layer (indirect contact), and an information-sharing layer. Through scenario analyses, we compare the disease transmission dynamics, the distribution of outbreak epidemic size, and the disease breakout percentage of different contact structures – only direct contact, only indirect contact, and their combination. In addition, we evaluate different types of information sharing methods by comparing the epidemic size and the estimated economic loss. Simulation results show that neither direct contact nor indirect contact individually can result in a massive outbreak of the disease, but their combination plays a significant role. Additionally, we detect different probabilities of disease outbreaks by starting the simulations at different farms; starting at some farms with high capacity increases the probability of disease outbreaks. Three different information sharing-networks are developed and found effective in preventing the disease from spreading and reducing the economic loss. The information-sharing layer based on trading records has the best performance when compared with a random network and a geographic network.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
We explore the effect of the information-sharing network and the fraction of participated farms on the epidemic size and estimated economic loss when there is an outbreak. We develop three different types of information-sharing networks, which are the random network, the trade-recording network, and the geographic network, and find that the trade-recording network has the best performance in minimizing the estimated economic loss. In addition, the participation rate plays a significant role for trade-recording information-sharing network in minimizing the loss. It is not necessary to have all farms participating in the information-sharing network for the minimum loss.