{"id":863,"date":"2012-01-07T14:58:27","date_gmt":"2012-01-07T04:58:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?p=863"},"modified":"2012-01-19T15:05:11","modified_gmt":"2012-01-19T05:05:11","slug":"call-for-new-thinking-on-disease-prediction-and-planning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?p=863","title":{"rendered":"Call for new thinking on disease prediction and planning"},"content":{"rendered":"A University of Adelaide scientist says much more could be done to predict the likelihood and spread of serious disease \u2013 such as tuberculosis (TB) or foot-and-mouth disease \u2013 in Australian wildlife and commercial stock.\r\n\r\nCorey Bradshaw and colleagues have evaluated freely available software tools that provide a realistic prediction of the spread of disease among animals.\r\n\r\nThey used a combination of models to look at the possible spread of TB among feral water buffalo in the Northern Territory.\r\n\r\nIn the 1980s and 1990s the government of the time began a broad-scale culling program, culling tens of thousands of buffalo.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe cull successfully reduced or eradicated buffalo from major pastoral lands in the Northern Territory, taking tuberculosis with it, but since then there has been no major follow-up culling. The buffalo population is re-invading the formerly culled areas,\u201d Bradshaw, Director of Ecological Modelling at the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute, said.\r\n\r\n\u201cAlthough Australia now trades its livestock under the \u2018TB-free\u2019 banner, the disease is prevalent throughout Africa, southern Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia. Realistically, it\u2019s only a matter of time before it rears its ugly head again here. If it does, it could potentially cost our cattle industry billions of dollars.\u201dBradshaw said Australia needs to implement tools such as those combining disease and population models to help plan the response to any potential return of TB \u2013 or other, nastier diseases, such as foot-and-mouth.\r\n\r\n“We found that the probability of detecting a disease as well known as TB in buffalo was extremely small, even for thousands of \u2018sentinel\u2019 animals culled each year. Current monitoring programs by the Northern Australia Quarantine Strategy [part of the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service] could definitely benefit from the use of these software tools, which are freely available for anyone to download,\u201d Bradshaw said.\r\n\r\n“If the goal of culling programs is to reduce prevalence of TB to near-zero, our prediction is that somewhere between 30 to 50 per cent of the current buffalo population would have to be culled each year for about 15 years. That\u2019s at least 100,000 killed over the first five years.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe team’s work has been published in the Journal of Applied Ecology<\/em> and may be viewed at online<\/a>.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A University of Adelaide scientist says much more could be done to predict the likelihood and spread of serious disease \u2013 such as tuberculosis (TB) or foot-and-mouth disease \u2013 in Australian wildlife and commercial stock. Corey Bradshaw and colleagues have evaluated freely available software tools that provide a realistic prediction of the spread of disease […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[603,627,143,621,97,209,623,624,625,622,626],"class_list":["post-863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-603","tag-corey-bradshaw","tag-december","tag-december-2012","tag-disease","tag-nt","tag-prediction","tag-tb","tag-tuberculosis","tag-university-of-adelaide","tag-water-buffalos"],"rise-blocks_total_comments":0,"rise-blocks_categories":[{"term_id":5,"name":"News","slug":"news","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":5,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":400,"filter":"raw","cat_ID":5,"category_count":400,"category_description":"","cat_name":"News","category_nicename":"news","category_parent":0}],"rise-blocks_excerpt":"A University of Adelaide scientist says much more could be done to predict the likelihood and spread of serious disease \u2013 such as tuberculosis (TB) or foot-and-mouth disease \u2013 in Australian wildlife and commercial stock. Corey Bradshaw and colleagues have evaluated freely available software tools that provide a realistic prediction of the spread of disease among animals. They used a..","blog_post_layout_featured_media_urls":{"thumbnail":"","full":""},"categories_names":{"5":{"name":"News","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?cat=5"}},"tags_names":{"603":{"name":"2012","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?tag=2012"},"627":{"name":"Corey Bradshaw","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?tag=corey-bradshaw"},"143":{"name":"December","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?tag=december"},"621":{"name":"December 2012","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?tag=december-2012"},"97":{"name":"disease","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?tag=disease"},"209":{"name":"NT","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?tag=nt"},"623":{"name":"prediction","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?tag=prediction"},"624":{"name":"TB","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?tag=tb"},"625":{"name":"tuberculosis","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?tag=tuberculosis"},"622":{"name":"University of Adelaide","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?tag=university-of-adelaide"},"626":{"name":"water buffalos","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?tag=water-buffalos"}},"comments_number":"0","wpmagazine_modules_lite_featured_media_urls":{"thumbnail":"","cvmm-medium":"","cvmm-medium-plus":"","cvmm-portrait":"","cvmm-medium-square":"","cvmm-large":"","cvmm-small":"","full":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=863"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":864,"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863\/revisions\/864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}