Multilayer network analysis of FMD transmission and containment among beef cattle farms

As a highly contagious livestock viral disease, foot-and-mouth disease poses a great threat to the beef-cattle industry. Direct animal movement is always considered as a major route for between-farm transmission of FMD virus. Sharing contaminated equipment and vehicles have also attracted increasing interests as an indirect but considerable route for FMD virus transmission. With the rapid development of communication technologies, information-sharing techniques have been used to control epidemics. In this paper, we built farm-level time-series three-layer networks to simulate the between-farm FMD virus transmission in southwest Kansas by cattle movements (direct-contact layer) and truck visits (indirect-contact layer) and evaluate the impact of information-sharing techniques (information-sharing layer) on mitigating the epidemic. Here, the information-sharing network is defined as the structure that enables the quarantine of farms that are connected with infected farms. When a farm is infected, its infection status is shared with the neighboring farms in the information-sharing network, which in turn become quarantined. The results show that truck visits can enlarge the epidemic size and prolong the epidemic duration of the FMD outbreak by cattle movements, and that the information-sharing technique is able to mitigate the epidemic. The mitigation effect of the information-sharing network varies with the information-sharing network topology and different participation levels. In general, an increased participation leads to a decreased epidemic size and an increased quarantine size. We compared the mitigation performance of three different information-sharing networks (random network, contact-based network, and distance-based network) and found the outbreak on the network with contact-based information-sharing layer has the smallest epidemic size under almost any participation level and smallest quarantine size with high participation. Furthermore, we explored the potential economic loss from the infection and the quarantine. By varying the ratio of the average loss of quarantine to the loss of infection, we found high participation results in reduced economic losses under the realistic assumption that culling costs are much greater than quarantine costs.