Key result
In simulated severe foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks, augmenting stamping out with vaccination significantly reduced the predicted number of infected premises and outbreak duration compared to stamping out alone.
Why the study?
Does vaccination in addition to stamping out reduce epidemic size and duration in simulated foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks?
Does vaccination in addition to stamping out reduce epidemic size and duration in simulated foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks?
Simulation modeling demonstrates that early vaccination with unconstrained resources, when added to stamping out, consistently reduces the size and duration of severe foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks across different countries.
Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
Supports adding vaccination to stamping-out in FMD models; leaves open real-world translation and resource feasibility.
Vaccination is increasingly being recognised as a potential tool to supplement ‘stamping out’ for controlling foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreaks in non-endemic countries. Infectious disease simulation models provide the opportunity to determine how vaccination might be used in the face of an FMD outbreak. Previously, consistent relative benefits of specific vaccination strategies across different FMD simulation modelling platforms have been demonstrated, using a UK FMD outbreak scenario. We extended this work to assess the relative effectiveness of selected vaccination strategies in five countries: Australia, New Zealand, the USA, the UK and Canada. A comparable, but not identical, FMD outbreak scenario was developed for each country with initial seeding of Pan Asia type O FMD virus into an area with a relatively high density of livestock farms. A series of vaccination strategies (in addition to stamping out (SO)) were selected to evaluate key areas of interest from a disease response perspective, including timing of vaccination, species considerations (e.g. vaccination of only those farms with cattle), risk area vaccination and resources available for vaccination. The study found that vaccination used with SO was effective in reducing epidemic size and duration in a severe outbreak situation. Early vaccination and unconstrained resources for vaccination consistently outperformed other strategies. Vaccination of only those farms with cattle produced comparable results, with some countries demonstrating that this could be as effective as all species vaccination. Restriction of vaccination to higher risk areas was less effective than other strategies. This study demonstrates consistency in the relative effectiveness of selected vaccination strategies under different outbreak start up conditions conditional on the assumption that each of the simulation models provide a realistic estimation of FMD virus spread. Preferred outbreak management approaches must however balance the principles identified in this study, working to clearly defined outbreak management objectives, while having a good understanding of logistic requirements and the socio-economic implications of different control measures.
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Rawdon et al. (2018) studied Foot-and-mouth disease. Vaccination in addition to stamping out vs. Stamping out alone was evaluated on Total number of infected places (IPs) and outbreak duration (p=<0.01). In simulated severe foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks, augmenting stamping out with vaccination significantly reduced the predicted number of infected premises and outbreak duration compared to stamping out alone.
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