Abstract

Abstract: Emerging diseases of livestock can devastate the agricultural industry and have a severe impact upon livestock exports. It is therefore vital to provide tools to assess the risk associated with infectious diseases and establish surveillance and intervention protocols that will reduce the cost of such outbreaks in the future. In this presentation, I will discuss the role of infectious disease models in supporting contingency planning for livestock disease outbreaks. These models typically require data on locations, sizes and species compositions of farms, as well as detailed information on any animals that are infected with the disease. However, in many settings such data are not available. I will therefore demonstrate how models can support infectious disease control in settings where such detailed data are not accessible and how surveillance resources should be targeted to reduce model uncertainty and provide accurate predictions regarding the future spread of disease.

Bio: Prof. Mike Tildesley is a Professor of Infectious Disease Modelling at the University of Warwick. He has an interest in the predictive power of models in the early stages of emerging disease outbreaks and in communicating modelling results to policy advisors. He has extensive experience of modelling livestock disease systems, including Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) and Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI). Prof. Tildesley has advised the UK Government’s Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations about strategies for control of livestock diseases including FMD and HPAI . From March 2020 to March 2022, He was a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Modelling Operational group (SPI-M-O), and worked extensively on COVID -19, providing policy advice to the UK government.