%0 Journal Article
%T Geographic and topographic determinants of local FMD transmission applied to the 2001 UK FMD epidemic
%A Paul R Bessell
%A Darren J Shaw
%A Nicholas J Savill
%A Mark EJ Woolhouse
%J BMC Veterinary Research
%D 2008
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1746-6148-4-40
%X Road distance between holdings, access to holdings, presence of forest, elevation change between holdings and the presence of intervening roads had no impact on the risk of local FMD transmission (p > 0.2). However the presence of linear features in the form of rivers and railways acted as barriers to FMD transmission (odds ratio = 0.507, 95% CIs = 0.297,0.887, p = 0.018).This paper demonstrated that although FMD spread can generally be modelled using Euclidean distance and numbers of animals on susceptible holdings, the presence of rivers and railways has an additional protective effect reducing the probability of transmission between holdings.Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) is a highly infectious viral disease of cloven hoofed animals. The outbreak that occurred in the UK between February and September 2001 resulted in 2026 Infected Premises (IPs) on the British mainland. An estimated 4.2 million animals were slaughtered for disease control purposes and another 2.5 million for welfare purposes [1]. The estimated direct and indirect costs of the epidemic were ¡ê6 billion [2].The FMD virus can be transmitted through a variety of routes including aerosol transmission, direct contact between animals and on fomites, furthermore, the virus has been shown to spread over distances greater than 100 km by viral plumes [3]. During the early stages of the 2001 UK epidemic long range transmission events were facilitated by the movements of infected animals; this was largely brought to an end by the imposition of the national movement ban (NMB) on susceptible animals introduced on the 23rd February. From this date, disease transmission was more localised with over 50% of transmission events occurring across distances of less than 3 km and more than 80% over distances of less than 10 km [4-6]. Some mathematical models of FMD transmission [6-8] incorporate this distance decay effect in the form of a kernel which describes the declining probability of infection with distance from an i
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1746-6148/4/40