Department of Farm Animal Health, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University, Yalelaan 7, 3584 CL, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Vet Res. 2011 Jun 29;42(1):81. doi: 10.1186/1297-9716-42-81.
The control of highly infectious diseases of livestock such as classical swine fever, foot-and-mouth disease, and avian influenza is fraught with ethical, economic, and public health dilemmas. Attempts to control outbreaks of these pathogens rely on massive culling of infected farms, and farms deemed to be at risk of infection. Conventional approaches usually involve the preventive culling of all farms within a certain radius of an infected farm. Here we propose a novel culling strategy that is based on the idea that farms that have the highest expected number of secondary infections should be culled first. We show that, in comparison with conventional approaches (ring culling), our new method of risk based culling can reduce the total number of farms that need to be culled, the number of culled infected farms (and thus the expected number of human infections in case of a zoonosis), and the duration of the epidemic. Our novel risk based culling strategy requires three pieces of information, viz. the location of all farms in the area at risk, the moments when infected farms are detected, and an estimate of the distance-dependent probability of transmission.
对猪瘟、口蹄疫和禽流感等高度传染性家畜疾病的控制充满了伦理、经济和公共卫生方面的困境。控制这些病原体的爆发依赖于大规模扑杀受感染的农场和被认为有感染风险的农场。传统方法通常涉及在受感染农场的一定半径范围内预防性扑杀所有农场。在这里，我们提出了一种新的扑杀策略，该策略基于这样一种观点，即应该首先扑杀预计会发生二次感染的农场。我们表明，与传统方法（环式扑杀）相比，我们基于风险的新扑杀方法可以减少需要扑杀的农场总数、被扑杀的感染农场数量（因此，如果发生人畜共患病，预计感染人数）以及疫情持续时间。我们的新型基于风险的扑杀策略需要三个信息，即：危险区域内所有农场的位置、发现受感染农场的时间以及与距离相关的传播概率的估计。
