Assessing the impact of structural modifications in the construction of surveillance network for Peste des petits ruminants disease in Nigeria: The role of backbone and sentinel nodes

作者：Asma Mesdour, Sandra I. Ijoma, Muhammad-Bashir Bolajoko, Elena Arsevska, Mamadou Ciss, Éric Cardinale, Mathieu Andraud, Andrea Apolloni · 发表于：PLoS ONE · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1371/journal.pone.0303237 · 被引用次数：5 · 研究领域：Animal Disease Management and Epidemiology、Virology and Viral Diseases、Viral Infections and Vectors

Peste des petits ruminants (PPR) is a highly contagious disease affecting mainly sheep and goats. Livestock movements contribute to the spread of the disease by introducing it to naive areas or exposing susceptible animals to it in infected regions. Because of its socio-economic impact, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH) have set the goal to eradicate it by 2030, one of the key steps being the improvement of surveillance networks. The present study aimed to provide tools to identify areas that could serve as sentinel nodes, i.e. areas that may be rapidly infected at the onset of epidemics. Using data from a market survey conducted in Northern Nigeria, we reconstructed the small ruminants mobility network and simulated the diffusion of PPR virus through animal movement. From the analysis of simulation outcomes, we investigated which nodes could act as sentinel nodes under specific conditions for disease transmission. We considered several modified networks to get around the problem of data only being available for part of the overall network structure and to account for potential errors made during the field study. For each configuration, we simulated the spread of PPR using a stochastic Susceptible-Infectious (SI) model based on animal movements to assess the epidemics' extent and the presence of recurrent patterns to identify potential sentinel nodes. We extracted the backbone of the reference network and checked f...