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Contact tracing for the control of infectious disease epidemics: Chronic Wasting Disease in deer farms
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Contact tracing for the control of infectious disease epidemics: Chronic Wasting Disease in deer farms

Chris Rorres, Maria Romano, Jennifer A. Miller, Jana M. Mossey, Tony H. Grubesic, David E. Zellner and Gary Smith
Epidemics, v 23
Jun 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epidem.2017.12.006
PMID: 29329958
url
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epidem.2017.12.006View
Published, Version of Record (VoR)CC BY-NC-ND V4.0,  Open

Abstract

Chronic Wasting Disease Contact tracing Directed graphs Strongly connected components
•Graph theory is applied to contact tracing for infectious disease epidemics.•Chronic Wasting Disease among deer farms in Pennsylvania is used as an example.•The impact of Strongly Connected Components of the directed graph is illustrated. Contact tracing is a crucial component of the control of many infectious diseases, but is an arduous and time consuming process. Procedures that increase the efficiency of contact tracing increase the chance that effective controls can be implemented sooner and thus reduce the magnitude of the epidemic. We illustrate a procedure using Graph Theory in the context of infectious disease epidemics of farmed animals in which the epidemics are driven mainly by the shipment of animals between farms. Specifically, we created a directed graph of the recorded shipments of deer between deer farms in Pennsylvania over a timeframe and asked how the properties of the graph could be exploited to make contact tracing more efficient should Chronic Wasting Disease (a prion disease of deer) be discovered in one of the farms. We show that the presence of a large strongly connected component in the graph has a significant impact on the number of contacts that can arise.

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21 citations in Web of Science
29 citations in Scopus

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Infectious Diseases
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