Abstract
The 2001 epidemic of Foot- and Mouth Disease (FMD) in the Netherlands has been brought
to a halt by a combination of pre-emptive culling, emergency vaccination and depopulation
measures in a large area comprising about 1800 farms. After the large Dutch HPAI epidemic
in poultry in 2003, public acceptance of intervention strategies based on massive culling has
further eroded. Policy makers in the Netherlands are therefore interested in assessing the use
of emergency vaccination as a basis for intervention in the future.
Here we use spatial transmission models to analyse the transmission potential of FMD
between farms in the Netherlands, and to assess the expected efficacy of a set of alternative
emergency vaccination strategies in curbing FMD spread. Our results, presented in the form
of risk-maps for FMD spread, suggest that ring-culling or ring-vaccination strategies are
insufficiently effective to achieve epidemic control in certain important areas in the
Netherlands (with high densities of farms). In these areas only area-wide culling and/or
vaccination strategies would stand a chance of being effective. On the positive side, our
results suggest that in much of the Netherlands outside the high-density areas, standard
intervention measures as required by the EU (a movement standstill, bio-security measures
and culling of infected farms and dangerous-contact farms) would be sufficient to curb local
propagation of the epidemic
Original language | English |
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Number of pages | 9 |
Publication status | Published - 2006 |
Event | 11th Symposium of the International Society for Veterinary Epidemiology and Economics - Duration: 6 Aug 2006 → 11 Aug 2006 |
Conference
Conference | 11th Symposium of the International Society for Veterinary Epidemiology and Economics |
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Period | 6/08/06 → 11/08/06 |