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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Vet. Sci.
Sec. Veterinary Epidemiology and Economics
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fvets.2024.1468864
This article is part of the Research Topic Insights in Veterinary Epidemiology and Economics: 2023 View all 7 articles

Modeling foot-and-mouth disease dissemination in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil and evaluating the effectiveness of control measures

Provisionally accepted
Nicolas Cespedes Cardenas Nicolas Cespedes Cardenas 1*Francisco Paulo Nunes Lopes Francisco Paulo Nunes Lopes 2Alencar Machado Alencar Machado 3Vinicius Maran Vinicius Maran 3Celio Trois Celio Trois 3,4Felipe A. Machado Felipe A. Machado 3GUSTAVO MACHADO GUSTAVO MACHADO 1
  • 1 Department of Population Health and Pathobiology, College of Veterinary Medicine, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
  • 2 Departamento de Defesa Agropecuária, Secretaria da Agricultura, Pecuária e Desenvolvimento Rural, Porto Alegre, Brazil
  • 3 Laboratory of Ubiquitous, Mobile and Applied Computing (LUMAC), Polytechnic College of Federal University of Santa Maria, Santa Maria, Brazil
  • 4 Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is known to infect multiple food-animal species and spread among ungulate populations. We introduce a multiscale compartmental stochastic model incorporating population dynamics, births, deaths, and species-specific transmission dynamics. The model integrates disease dynamics at both the between-farm and within-farm levels. We developed four scenarios to evaluate the effectiveness of countermeasures, including movement standstill, vaccination, and depopulation. The base scenario involved vaccinating 20 farms and the depopulation of four infected farms. Three alternative control scenarios included the increase of vaccination and depopulation capacities and a scenario with no vaccination. Our findings indicate that bovines were the most frequently infected species, followed by swine and small ruminants. After ten days of initial spread, disease spread resulted in a range of infected farms from 1 to 123, with most simulations (90.12%) resulting in fewer than 50 infected farms. Most of the secondary spread was within 25 km. Early response to initiating the control action farms reduces the days working on control actions while intensifying daily depopulation and vaccination capacity, which may be worth considering in decision-making processes for future control of FMD. The emergency vaccination proved to be efficient in reducing the magnitude and duration of outbreaks, whereas the increase in depopulation without the use of vaccination also proved to be effective in eliminating the outbreaks.

    Keywords: Dynamical Models, infectious disease control, Epidemiology, transmission, Targeted control, FMD (Foot and Mouth Disease), simulation

    Received: 22 Jul 2024; Accepted: 15 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Cespedes Cardenas, Nunes Lopes, Machado, Maran, Trois, Machado and MACHADO. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Nicolas Cespedes Cardenas, Department of Population Health and Pathobiology, College of Veterinary Medicine, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, 27607, North Carolina, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.