Analysis and prediction of the cattle trade network in France to inform epidemiological risk
Résumé
Effective control of livestock infectious diseases is a major issue for sustainable animal farming and competitive agri-food chains, as well as for public health. Livestock trade movements is one of the most important pathways for pathogen transmission between holdings. Therefore, it is crucial to understand and be able to predict the temporal evolution of the network of animal movements, and assess the risk related to epidemics unfolding on this network.
Here, we focus on the study of cattle trade network in France, based on a fully detailed dataset spanning over several years, extracted from the French database of cattle movements, which records life histories of all French cattle from birth to death.
If time permits, results on two aspects, i.e. prediction of the temporal dynamics of cattle movements and assessment of epidemiological risk, will be presented. On the first axis, performances of statistical models predicting the occurrence of transactions between holdings based on their characteristics as covariates, on one hand, and of a microeconomic model incorporating generic components for trade of cattle at the holding level, on the other hand, will be discussed. On the second axis, proxies for pathogen spread, such as percolation and reachability ratio, accounting for network time-varying properties and for simple epidemiological assumptions on transmission probability and epidemic dynamics, and computed using efficient algorithms of network exploration will be provided