Future outbreaks of foot-and-mouth (FMD) disease can be combatted quickly and efficiently from early on – when authorities have minimal information – thanks to a new real-time strategy, developed by researchers at the University of Warwick.
Dr Michael Tildesley and Dr William Probert in Warwick’s School of Life Sciences and Mathematics Institute discovered that the most effective policies for the start of a FMD outbreak, even when we know very little about it, are focusing on surveillance and vaccination.
Determining the optimal strategy to control FMD can be challenging in the first weeks of an epidemic, due to uncertainty about the nature of the outbreak and how the disease will be spread. The researchers sought to resolve this uncertainty, enabling the spread of the disease to be controlled more rapidly and effectively than in the past.
Using data from previous FMD outbreaks – the UK in 2001 and Japan in 2010 – they simulated the spread of disease, and at each stage of the outbreak analysed the real-time efficacy of multiple different approaches.
These methods included:
- Culling only infected farms;
- Culling infected farms, plus farms designated as dangerous contact;
- Culling infected farms, dangerous contact farms and neighbouring farms (contiguous culling);
- Ring culling at three kilometres, and at 10 kilometres; and
- Vaccination at three kilometres, and at 10 kilometres.
Dr Michael Tildesley, associate professor in the University of Warwick’s School of Life Sciences and Mathematics Institute, said: “This work highlights both the limitations and the benefits of using an infectious disease model in real time, during an ongoing outbreak.
“It is crucial for policymakers to employ surveillance to resolve uncertainty in how the disease is spreading as rapidly as possible, as this may have significant implications upon our ability to predict future epidemic behaviour.”
