Abstract
Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) infects multiple food-animal species and disseminates among ungulate species. FMD is known to disseminate through a combination of within-host and between-host dynamics. Several single-species FMD transmission models have been used to simulate outbreaks and examine the effects of control actions to mitigate outbreaks, however, often focusing on individual food animal species such as cattle. Our multi-species and multiscale (metapopulation and between-farm dissemination driven by animal movement and farm-to-farm distance) compartmental stochastic model accounts for births, deaths, and species-specific transmission dynamics. Our model outputs included the number of secondarily infected animals and farms, the role of animal movement and between-farm distances as transmission pathways, and the effectiveness of countermeasure actions. Our results demonstrated that after 20 days of FMD dissemination without any control actions, all the species were infected, and the median number of infected farms was eight. The spatial proximity was the predominant route associated with bovine infection, while in swine, it was linked with animal movements.
Furthermore, the median distance between seeded, and secondary infections was 5.77 km, with the highest spatial dissemination reaching 695.40 km. The simulated control strategy results showed that depopulating 12 farms and vaccinating 15,000 farms daily after 20 days of silent FMD dissemination would contain 93.4% of epidemics, with a median of, nine infected farms within 54 days after implementing control actions. In conclusion, our model highlights the need for multispecies FMD transmission models, especially in regions where multiple species are raised on the same premises.