Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a highly infectious disease affecting cloven-hoofed ruminants. FMD is endemic across Asia, Africa and South America and, as demonstrated by the 2001 outbreak in the UK, can cause devastating epidemics in FMD free countries. A comprehensive dataset comprising the births, deaths and farm-to-farm movements of almost fifty million cattle was made available to us by the Turkish authorities. In chapter 2 we discuss the processing, cleaning and analysis of this dataset. Cattle movement networks were built using farms as nodes and the farm-to-farm movements as edges before performing a network analysis. The richness and completeness of the Turkish data set is not generally available to modellers. In chapter 3 we implement various sampling strategies to determine the quantity of network data required to give accurate epidemiological predictions, using the British cattle trade network as a case study. In chapter 4 we introduce community detection as a method for analysing the cattle movement networks of both the UK and Turkey. This analysis goes beyond the calculation of the farm level statistics calculated in chapter 2 and seeks to find higher order structures in these networks. Chapter 5 develops a within farm model of FMD by drawing on outbreak data from two farms of different sizes in Turkey. This model is parametrised by running a Bayesian inference scheme on the smaller of the two farms. Simulations were then performed on both farms using the inferred posterior parameter distributions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:707426 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Dawson, Peter Michael |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/87493/ |
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