Abstract

abstract: “Tracking animal movements over time may fundamentally determine the success of disease control interventions. In this study, we reconstructed pig networks of one Brazilian state from 2017 to 2018, comprising 351,519 movements and 48 million transported pigs. We propose a time-dependent network approach combined with a susceptible-infected model to Spread an epidemic over the pig network. We propagated disease to calculate the cumulative contacts as a proxy of epidemic sizes and evaluate the impact of network-based disease control strategies. The results show that targeting 1,000 farms ranked by degree would be sufficient and feasible to diminish disease spread considerably. The epidemic sizes and the number of farms needed to be targeted were quite similar independently from where initial infections were seeded. The proposed strategy limited the transmission of secondarily infected farms to 29 over two simulated years. These results highlight the modeling framework’s effectiveness in providing a parsimonious solution for targeted disease surveillance when temporal movement data are available.”