Herrera-Diestra JL, Tildesley M, Shea K, Ferrari MJ (2022) Cattle transport network predicts endemic and epidemic foot-and-mouth disease risk on farms in Turkey. PLoS Comput Biol 18(8): e1010354.
Contact network epidemiology has been extensively used in the context of infectious diseases, primarily focusing on epidemic diseases. In this paper we use detailed recorded data about cattle exchange between farms in Turkey from 2007 to 2012, to build, analyze and characterize the directed-weighted complex network of shipments of cattle. Additionally, using outbreaks data about recorded cases of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in Turkey, we assess the correlation between the “farm’s” position in the network (importance) and the risk of being infected with FMD, which has been endemic in Turkey for a long time. We find some network measures that are more likely to identify high-risk and low-risk farms (in-degree and in-coreness, respectively) when proposing strategies for surveillance or containment of an infectious disease.
Read the full article at: journals.plos.org
Complexity Digest 