Assessing the efficacy of vaccination strategies in curbing epidemics of Foot-and-Mouth Disease in The Netherlands.

The 2001 epidemic of Foot- and Mouth Disease (FMD) in the Netherlands has been brought to a halt by a combination of pre-emptive culling, emergency vaccination and depopulation measures in a large area comprising about 1800 farms. After the large Dutch HPAI epidemic in poultry in 2003, public acceptance of intervention strategies based on massive culling has further eroded. Policy makers in the Netherlands are therefore interested in assessing the use of emergency vaccination as a basis for intervention in the future. Here we use spatial transmission models to analyse the transmission potentia... Mehr ...