Transmission risks and control of foot-and-mouth disease in The Netherlands: spatial patterns

In 2001 the epidemics of foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) in Great Britain, The Netherlands and France have shown how fast FMDV may spread between farms. The massive socio-economic impact of these epidemics and the intervention measures taken demonstrate the need for quantitative assessments of the efficacy of candidate intervention strategies. Here we use a mathematical model to describe the spatial transmission of FMDV in The Netherlands and use the Dutch 2001 outbreak data to estimate model parameters. We assess the effect of ring culling strategies using a novel and fast approach producing risk maps, and discuss its consequences for ring vaccination. These risk maps identify both the geographical areas of low risk, where a given intervention strategy is likely to achieve epidemic control within only two or three farm-to-farm infection generations, and high-risk areas, where control is likely to take (much) longer. Our results indicate that certain densely populated livestock areas in the Netherlands remain high-risk areas even for strategies that extend EU minimum measures with culling or vaccination within a ring radius of several kilometres. Depending on an economic assessment, area-wide vaccination might be judged appropriate once an FMDV outbreak would have been confirmed in or close to such a high-density area. The modeling approach developed here could be readily applied to outbreak data for other diseases and in other countries.