IFM Theory and Modelling, Linköping University, Linköping 581 83 Sweden.
J R Soc Interface. 2012 Jun 7;9(71):1287-94. doi: 10.1098/rsif.2011.0625. Epub 2011 Nov 23.
Studies of between-herd contacts may provide important insight to disease transmission dynamics. By comparing the result from models with different levels of detail in the description of animal movement, we studied how factors influence the final epidemic size as well as the dynamic behaviour of an outbreak. We investigated the effect of contact heterogeneity of pig herds in Sweden due to herd size, between-herd distance and production type. Our comparative study suggests that the production-type structure is the most influential factor. Hence, our results imply that production type is the most important factor to obtain valid data for and include when modelling and analysing this system. The study also revealed that all included factors reduce the final epidemic size and also have yet more diverse effects on initial rate of disease spread. This implies that a large set of factors ought to be included to assess relevant predictions when modelling disease spread between herds. Furthermore, our results show that a more detailed model changes predictions regarding the variability in the outbreak dynamics and conclude that this is an important factor to consider in risk assessment.
对畜群间接触的研究可以为疾病传播动态提供重要的见解。通过比较在动物运动描述方面具有不同详细程度的模型的结果，我们研究了各种因素如何影响最终的疫情规模以及疫情爆发的动态行为。我们调查了由于畜群规模、畜群间距离和生产类型不同而导致瑞典猪群接触异质性的影响。我们的比较研究表明，生产类型结构是最具影响力的因素。因此，我们的研究结果表明，在建模和分析该系统时，生产类型是获得有效数据和包含相关数据的最重要因素。该研究还表明，所有包含的因素都降低了最终的疫情规模，并且对疾病传播的初始速度也有更多样化的影响。这意味着在畜群间疾病传播建模时，需要纳入大量因素来评估相关预测。此外，我们的研究结果表明，更详细的模型会改变对疫情爆发动态变化的预测，并得出这是风险评估中需要考虑的一个重要因素的结论。
