Animal infectious diseases
Animal diseases represent an important threat to human health, since the emergence of human diseases is dominated by zoonotic pathogens. We work on infectious diseases affecting livestock and also wild animals, focusing on characterizing the conditions for the pathogen spread and maintenance in the host population.
A large amount of data is available for livestock movements, as European countries monitor farmed animals at the individual level and on a daily basis. Such monitoring efforts have led to a unique opportunity of studying animal movements in a comprehensive way, characterizing their behavior in time and space, and identifying patterns that may become relevant for the spread of a potential disease in the livestock population.
In particular, the coexistence of stationary heterogeneous behaviors at the system level with strong temporal fluctuations at the microscopic level limits our understanding of the disease spread through movements, and of its prevention, prediction, and control, because of:
(i) the strong dependence of the spreading pattern on the initial conditions, both geographical and temporal, and
(ii) the lack of meaningful definitions of nodes’ importance, given the observed large temporal fluctuations of measures of centrality based on static structural properties.
Novel methods of investigation, simulation and analysis need to be developed to face these challenges.
A large amount of data is available for livestock movements, as European countries monitor farmed animals at the individual level and on a daily basis. Such monitoring efforts have led to a unique opportunity of studying animal movements in a comprehensive way, characterizing their behavior in time and space, and identifying patterns that may become relevant for the spread of a potential disease in the livestock population.
In particular, the coexistence of stationary heterogeneous behaviors at the system level with strong temporal fluctuations at the microscopic level limits our understanding of the disease spread through movements, and of its prevention, prediction, and control, because of:
(i) the strong dependence of the spreading pattern on the initial conditions, both geographical and temporal, and
(ii) the lack of meaningful definitions of nodes’ importance, given the observed large temporal fluctuations of measures of centrality based on static structural properties.
Novel methods of investigation, simulation and analysis need to be developed to face these challenges.