Models for regional heartwater epidemiology in a variable environment.

Area of Science:

• Veterinary Epidemiology
• Disease Modeling
• Ecology

Background:

• Heartwater disease poses a significant threat to cattle production.
• Previous models focused on single production units, limiting regional control strategy analysis.
• Understanding environmental variability's impact is key for effective disease management.

Purpose of the Study:

• To expand a heartwater epidemic model to a multi-farm region.
• To investigate the influence of environmental variability on disease control strategies.
• To identify optimal control measures under different variability scenarios.

Main Methods:

• Epidemiological modeling of heartwater dynamics.
• Expansion of a single-unit model to a regional, multi-farm scale.
• Analysis of constant and time-variant epidemiologic parameters within and between farms.

Main Results:

• Regional variation in removal rates increases infected cattle fractions when farm parameters are constant.
• Regional variation in transmission rates decreases infected cattle fractions when farm parameters are constant.
• Temporal variation in both transmission and removal rates increases infected cattle fractions.

Conclusions:

• Control strategies must account for the nature of environmental variability (spatial vs. temporal).
• Maintaining uniform removal rates and variable transmission rates is optimal for spatially variable environments.
• Uniformity in both transmission and removal rates is necessary for temporally variable environments.