Rob Deardon

The UK 2001 Foot-and-mouth Disease Epidemic (A Case Study in Individual Level Spatial Epidemiology)


Foot-and-Mouth disease (FMD) entered the UK in the beginning of
February 2001. By the time it had been eradicated it had exerted
terrible effects upon both the farming and tourism industries of the
UK. The control policies that were put in place by the UK government
have been the subject of much controversy, both at the time and since.
Vital to ensuring that any future outbreak is controlled efficiently
is that we have as a full an understanding of the spatio-temporal
dynamics of the disease as possible.

To this end, we present work undertaken to model these dynamics using
a Bayesian MCMC approach to parameterisation. Two areas of importance
arise. One is the form of the model itself. Here we use as our
starting point the model of Keeling et al (2001) which has been
extended to better capture the characteristics of the epidemic. The
second area of importance is how the model and MCMC updates can be
formulated in such a way that the computation time is not prohibitive.


Keeling, M. J., Woolhouse, M. E. J., Shaw, D. J., Matthews, L.,
Chase-Topping, M., Haydon, D. T., Cornell, S. J., Kappey, J.,
Wilesmith, J., and Grenfell, B. T.  Dynamics of the 2001 UK foot and
mouth epidemic - dispersal in a heterogeneous landscape. Science
294:813--817, 2001