Publication Date:
2014-07-11
Description:
Bovine tuberculosis (TB) is one of the most complex, persistent and controversial problems facing the British cattle industry, costing the country an estimated pound100 million per year. The low sensitivity of the standard diagnostic test leads to considerable ambiguity in determining the main transmission routes of infection, which exacerbates the continuing scientific debate. In turn this uncertainty fuels the fierce public and political disputes on the necessity of controlling badgers to limit the spread of infection. Here we present a dynamic stochastic spatial model for bovine TB in Great Britain that combines within-farm and between-farm transmission. At the farm scale the model incorporates stochastic transmission of infection, maintenance of infection in the environment and a testing protocol that mimics historical government policy. Between-farm transmission has a short-range environmental component and is explicitly driven by movements of individual cattle between farms, as recorded in the Cattle Tracing System. The resultant model replicates the observed annual increase of infection over time as well as the spread of infection into new areas. Given that our model is mechanistic, it can ascribe transmission pathways to each new case; the majority of newly detected cases involve several transmission routes with moving infected cattle, reinfection from an environmental reservoir and poor sensitivity of the diagnostic test all having substantive roles. This underpins our findings on the implications of control measures. Very few of the control options tested have the potential to reverse the observed annual increase, with only intensive strategies such as whole-herd culling or additional national testing proving highly effective, whereas controls focused on a single transmission route are unlikely to be highly effective.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Brooks-Pollock, Ellen -- Roberts, Gareth O -- Keeling, Matt J -- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council/United Kingdom -- Wellcome Trust/United Kingdom -- England -- Nature. 2014 Jul 10;511(7508):228-31. doi: 10.1038/nature13529. Epub 2014 Jul 2.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉1] Disease Dynamics Unit, Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0ES, UK [2] WIDER Centre, Mathematics Institute and School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. ; Department of Statistics, University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. ; WIDER Centre, Mathematics Institute and School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25008532" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
Cattle
;
*Computer Simulation
;
Great Britain
;
Health Policy
;
Mycobacterium bovis/physiology
;
Risk Factors
;
Tuberculosis, Bovine/*prevention & control/*transmission
Print ISSN:
0028-0836
Electronic ISSN:
1476-4687
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
