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

We have shown that the dynamic changes in the contact network are able to change the disease dynamics at the pen level. Furthermore, the network change has a larger effect for diseases with smaller R 0 (e.g. R 0 , 2, parameter set 1 in the simulation, as opposed to parameter set 2). For larger R 0 conditions, although the disease dynamics are still statistically different across the four conditions, in practice they may not show substantial differences because of fast dynamics and large outbreak size. However, for smaller R 0 conditions, the temporal variability in degree distribution and network order change (in C2) are further mingled with system stochasticity due to smaller transmission probability, resulting in a much smaller mean of R 0 but with substantially larger variance, and larger variance in outbreak size than in other conditions as well 34 . Other studies have demonstrated disease dynamics are further influenced by population size (especially smaller networks) 35, 36 .