Mark E J Woolhouse
Centre for Tropical Veterinary Medicine, University of Edinburgh
Easter Bush Veterinary Centre, Roslin, Midlothian EH25 9RG, UK
The UK 2001 epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease
is well described by a stochastic simulation model which, among other features, incorporates a spatially explicit map of the distribution of
susceptible livestock, with transmission between farms being dependent on the
distance between them. The model is relatively parsimonious, requiring just 4
parameters to be estimated from the data and performs much better than
analogous SLIR models which are not spatially explicit. The model can be used
to explore the expected impact of interventions designed to limit the size of
an epidemic, including prophylactive vaccination, pre-emptive culling or ring
vaccination in the neighbourhood of infected farms, large-scale reactive
vaccination, and ‘predictive’ vaccination which targets farms where
vaccination would be most effective in limiting the spread of infection. The
results indicate the importance of implementing effective interventions as
quickly as possible and have implications for future EC policy for controlling
foot-and-mouth disease epidemics.