Cowled BD, Gar­ner MG, Negus K, Ward MP. Vet Res. 16 Jan­u­ary 2012. 43(1):3.
Avail­able at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22243996

Abstract. Dis­ease mod­el­ling is one approach for pro­vid­ing new insights into wildlife dis­ease epi­demi­ol­ogy. This paper describes a spatio-temporal, sto­chas­tic, sus­cep­ti­ble– exposed-infected-recovered process model that sim­u­lates the poten­tial spread of clas­si­cal swine fever through a doc­u­mented, large and free liv­ing wild pig pop­u­la­tion fol­low­ing a sim­u­lated incur­sion. The study area (300 000 square kms) was in north­ern Aus­tralia. Pub­lished data on wild pig ecol­ogy from Aus­tralia, and inter­na­tional Clas­si­cal Swine Fever data was used to para­me­terise the model. Sen­si­tiv­ity analy­ses revealed that herd den­sity (best esti­mate 1–3 pigs per square km), daily herd move­ment dis­tances (best esti­mate approx­i­mately 1 km), prob­a­bil­ity of infec­tion trans­mis­sion between herds (best esti­mate 0.75%) and dis­ease related herd mor­tal­ity (best esti­mate 42%) were highly influ­en­tial on epi­demic size but that extra­or­di­nary move­ments of pigs and the yearly home range size of a pig herd were not. CSF gen­er­ally estab­lished (98% of sim­u­la­tions) fol­low­ing a sin­gle point intro­duc­tion. CSF spread at approx­i­mately 9 square kms per day with low inci­dence rates (< 2 herds per day) in an epi­demic wave along con­tigu­ous habi­tat for sev­eral years, before dying out (when the epi­demic arrived at the end of a con­tigu­ous sub-population or at a low den­sity wild pig area). The low inci­dence rate indi­cates that sur­veil­lance for wildlife dis­ease epi­demics caused by short lived infec­tions will be most effi­cient when sur­veil­lance is based on detec­tion and inves­ti­ga­tion of clin­i­cal events, although this may not always be prac­ti­cal. Epi­demics could be con­tained and erad­i­cated with culling (aer­ial shoot­ing) or vac­ci­na­tion when these were ade­quately imple­mented. It was appar­ent that the spa­tial struc­ture, ecol­ogy and behav­iour of wild pop­u­la­tions must be accounted for dur­ing dis­ease man­age­ment in wildlife. An impor­tant find­ing was that it may only be nec­es­sary to cull or vac­ci­nate rel­a­tively small pro­por­tions of a pop­u­la­tion to suc­cess­fully con­tain and erad­i­cate some wildlife dis­ease epidemics.