Investigating the Impact of Trade on the Spread of Livestock Diseases.
The trade of live animals is well documented and provides a model system for spreading processes on intrinsically temporal networks.
We are developing a mathematical language to describe the time dependent topology of the German pig and cattle trade networks. The goal is to define risk-based centrality measures capturing the full dynamics of the network.
Their usefulness for veterinary disease control is evaluated.
Predictability of Livestock Trade.
To support administration during a crisis it is obligatory to understand the driving forces behind the formation of a trade networks.
We investigate the principal possibility of predictabilty with the help of tools from statistical physics.
Final goal is to provide a model which is able to predict short-term reactions of the trade network to an epidemic and subsequent legislative measures.
Describtion of In-Farm Networks.
Most network epidemiology relies on meta-population models. For animal trade networks homogeneous mixing in farms is usually assumed.
We will evaluate this assumption by the analysis of detailed in-farm mixing data of pig and cattle farms from differnt sources.