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

In farm animal agricultural settings, contact networks have been used to describe farm-to-farm disease transmission at large spatial scales across country or between countries [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] . Links between farms are constructed using animal movement databases. However, the contact structure within premises and at lower scales such as pen level are less understood despite their influence on disease transmission, especially for highly transmissible diseases 18, 19 . The characterization of animal-to-animal contact networks at higher temporal and spatial resolution within farm animal groups has been rarely investigated, and therefore it is unknown how these networks change over time, including their structure (e.g. degree distribution), the role of individuals (e.g. degree order, individual rank of degree distribution in the network), and the implications in the modeling approaches used to describe transmission. Homogeneous-mixing mean-field compartmental models with constant contact numbers through time and among individuals are commonly assumed and applied at these levels.