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Dynamic network measures reveal the impact of cattle markets and alpine summering on the risk of epidemic outbreaks in the Swiss cattle population

BACKGROUND: Livestock herds are interconnected with each other via an intricate network of transports of animals which represents a potential substrate for the spread of epidemic diseases. We analysed four years (2012–2015) of daily bovine transports to assess the risk of disease transmission and id...

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Autores principales: Vidondo, Beatriz, Voelkl, Bernhard
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5851077/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29534711
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12917-018-1406-3
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author Vidondo, Beatriz
Voelkl, Bernhard
author_facet Vidondo, Beatriz
Voelkl, Bernhard
author_sort Vidondo, Beatriz
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Livestock herds are interconnected with each other via an intricate network of transports of animals which represents a potential substrate for the spread of epidemic diseases. We analysed four years (2012–2015) of daily bovine transports to assess the risk of disease transmission and identify times and locations where monitoring would be most effective. Specifically, we investigated how the seasonal dynamics of transport networks, driven by the alpine summering and traditional cattle markets, affect the risk of epidemic outbreaks. RESULTS: We found strong and consistent seasonal variation in several structural network measures as well as in measures for outbreak risk. Analysis of the consequences of excluding markets, dealers and alpine pastures from the network shows that markets contribute much more to the overall outbreak risk than alpine summering. Static descriptors of monthly transport networks were poor predictors of outbreak risk emanating from individual holdings; a dynamic measure, which takes the temporal structure of the network into account, gave better risk estimates. A stochastic simulation suggests that targeted surveillance based on this dynamic network allows a higher detection rate and smaller outbreak size at detection than compared to other sampling schemes. CONCLUSIONS: Dynamic measures based on time-stamped data—the outgoing contact chain—can give better risk estimates and could help to improve surveillance schemes. Using this measure we find evidence that even in a country with intense summering practice, markets continue being the prime risk factor for the spread of contagious diseases.
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spelling pubmed-58510772018-03-21 Dynamic network measures reveal the impact of cattle markets and alpine summering on the risk of epidemic outbreaks in the Swiss cattle population Vidondo, Beatriz Voelkl, Bernhard BMC Vet Res Research Article BACKGROUND: Livestock herds are interconnected with each other via an intricate network of transports of animals which represents a potential substrate for the spread of epidemic diseases. We analysed four years (2012–2015) of daily bovine transports to assess the risk of disease transmission and identify times and locations where monitoring would be most effective. Specifically, we investigated how the seasonal dynamics of transport networks, driven by the alpine summering and traditional cattle markets, affect the risk of epidemic outbreaks. RESULTS: We found strong and consistent seasonal variation in several structural network measures as well as in measures for outbreak risk. Analysis of the consequences of excluding markets, dealers and alpine pastures from the network shows that markets contribute much more to the overall outbreak risk than alpine summering. Static descriptors of monthly transport networks were poor predictors of outbreak risk emanating from individual holdings; a dynamic measure, which takes the temporal structure of the network into account, gave better risk estimates. A stochastic simulation suggests that targeted surveillance based on this dynamic network allows a higher detection rate and smaller outbreak size at detection than compared to other sampling schemes. CONCLUSIONS: Dynamic measures based on time-stamped data—the outgoing contact chain—can give better risk estimates and could help to improve surveillance schemes. Using this measure we find evidence that even in a country with intense summering practice, markets continue being the prime risk factor for the spread of contagious diseases. BioMed Central 2018-03-13 /pmc/articles/PMC5851077/ /pubmed/29534711 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12917-018-1406-3 Text en © The Author(s). 2018 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research Article
Vidondo, Beatriz
Voelkl, Bernhard
Dynamic network measures reveal the impact of cattle markets and alpine summering on the risk of epidemic outbreaks in the Swiss cattle population
title Dynamic network measures reveal the impact of cattle markets and alpine summering on the risk of epidemic outbreaks in the Swiss cattle population
title_full Dynamic network measures reveal the impact of cattle markets and alpine summering on the risk of epidemic outbreaks in the Swiss cattle population
title_fullStr Dynamic network measures reveal the impact of cattle markets and alpine summering on the risk of epidemic outbreaks in the Swiss cattle population
title_full_unstemmed Dynamic network measures reveal the impact of cattle markets and alpine summering on the risk of epidemic outbreaks in the Swiss cattle population
title_short Dynamic network measures reveal the impact of cattle markets and alpine summering on the risk of epidemic outbreaks in the Swiss cattle population
title_sort dynamic network measures reveal the impact of cattle markets and alpine summering on the risk of epidemic outbreaks in the swiss cattle population
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5851077/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29534711
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12917-018-1406-3
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