Schedule

Introductory concepts on risk preparedness.

• Review of the global and regional risk situation of foot-and-mouth disease.
• Brief discussion of key contents of contingency plans for foot-and-mouth disease in countries (and control strategies).
• Overview of the regional antigen bank, BANVACO.
• Emergency support system in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

Important concepts in disease transmission modeling.

• Importance of outbreak response planning.
• Introduction to disease transmission models.
• How simulation models can aid in the design and updating of control strategies.
• How to integrate model results with real-case scenarios.

The whole deal: why the R environment and RStudio.

• Installation of R, RStudio, and packages.
• Configuration of your computer system.
• MHASpread architecture.
• Loading the package and setting up the environment.
• Defining initial conditions.
• Selecting the originally infected farm.
• Exporting graphics and numerical output summaries.

Selecting the initial infection condition (with your own data).

• Seeding infections and reconstructing spread (epidemic size).
• Simulating control and eradication actions (vaccination, depopulation, movement restrictions).
• Exporting graphics and numerical output summaries.

Simulating the introduction and spread of foot-and-mouth disease in swine, bovine, and small ruminant populations.

• Estimating epidemic trajectories.
• Implementing control and eradication actions and proposing next steps for elimination.
• Extracting model results for decision-making.
• Simulating alternative control scenarios.
• Expanding the size of the control zone.
• Traceability in contact networks.
• Increasing the duration of control zones and surveillance activities.

Expert opinion panel on foot-and-mouth disease model parameters.

• Expert opinions will be used to select and adjust transmission parameters in various scenarios (i.e., estimates on the time intervals for laboratory confirmation after detection of infected facilities and for initiating depopulation protocol).
• Hot washing.

Based on the simulations you have conducted, what would you revise in your current foot-and-mouth disease contingency plan?