This is our Friday rubric: every week a new Science Page from the Bob Morrison’s Swine Health Monitoring Project. The previous editions of the science page are available on our website.
This week, Dr. Dennis Makau from the VanderWaal lab is sharing a project on the importance of swine movement to identify farms with a high risk of disease outbreak.
Key Points
- Animal movement is a key factor in the U.S. swine industry and is an important risk factor for disease transmission
- Animal movement data combined with social network analysis can inform risk-based surveillance and control
- Using production system movement data, it was possible to identify the time window of data needed to gauge connectivity and identify high-risk and high-spread farms
- Using previous data up to two years old is still better than choosing randomly implemented interventions to manage disease spread, especially in cases of outbreaks transmitted via animal movements
Continue reading “Temporal stability of swine movement networks in the U.S.”