Highly dynamic animal contact network and implications on disease transmission

Chen, Shi; White, Brad J.; Sanderson, Michael W.; Amrine, David E.; Ilany, Amiyaal; Lanzas, Cristina

Modeling Disease Transmission in a Dynamic Network. The time series of mean disease prevalence for all four conditions are presented in Fig. 4 . Characteristics of disease transmission such as maximum prevalence, its associated occurrence date, outbreak size (n), duration of outbreak (T f ), and basic reproduction number (R 0 ) are summarized in Table 1 . The maximum prevalence occurrence date, outbreak size, and the duration of outbreak did not differ substantially among the four conditions for parameter set 2 (higher R 0 ), whilst in parameter set 1 (lower R 0 ) these characteristics were more distinct. There were substantial differences in the maximum prevalence and the numerical R 0 . Of the four conditions in both parameter sets, R 0 was highest in C3 (with degree distribution change but no degree order change) and lowest in C2 (with degree order change but no distribution change), and it was consistent with other characteristics such as maximum prevalence, outbreak size, and duration of outbreak. In general, conditions with no degree order change (i.e. constant network degree order throughout time) had substantially higher maximum prevalence than those with degree order changes, for both parameter sets (set 1: C1 2 C2 5 4.89; C3 2 C4 5 4.82; set 2: C1 2 C2 5 10.47; C3 2 C4 5 3.12). This was expected because the individuals with consistently higher degree order would have more contacts through time, which caused a higher probability of infection. The conditions with temporal variability yielded higher maximum prevalence than no temporal variability counterparts for both The results demonstrated the statistically distinct disease dynamics of these four conditions. In general, the disease dynamics of C1 and C4 were more similar ( Fig. 4 and Table 1 ) than other pairs of conditions. We believe including temporal variability tended to increase disease prevalence, and incorporating degree order change tended to decrease transmission probability. These two factors acted in opposite directions and offset the effect of each other. Thus the final disease dynamics with both temporal and degree order change (C4) were similar to the condition with neither change (C1).