Modeling foot-and-mouth disease dissemination in Brazil and evaluating the effectiveness of control measures

Abstract

AbstractFoot-and-mouth disease (FMD) infects multiple food-animal species and disseminate among ungulate species. Here, we present a multiscale compartmental stochastic model that considers population dynamics, births, deaths, and species-specific transmission dynamics. The model considers two between-farm modes of FMD transmission integrating disease dynamics at the between-farm and within-farm levels. Our model outputs include the number of secondarily infected animals and farms, spatial dissemination, the role of animal movement and between- farm distances as transmission pathways, and the effectiveness of countermeasures. Here, we demonstrated that after 20 days of FMD dissemination, the median number of infected farms was 8. Spatial proximity was the predominant route associated bovine infection while in swine were linked with animal movements. Furthermore, the median distance between seeded and secondary infections was 5.77 with the highest spatial dissemination reaching 695.40 kilometers. The simulated control strategy results showed that depopulating 12 farms and vaccinating 15,000 farms per day after 20 days of silent FMD dissemination would contain 93.4% of epidemics with a median of 9 infected farms within 54 days after implementing control actions. In conclusion, the developed model highlights the need for developing multispecies FMD transmission models, especially in regions where multiple species are raised on the same premises.