Investigating the impact of adaptive control strategies on infectious disease outbreaks

Endemic and epidemic infectious diseases have the potential to undermine livestock sustainability and food security in the UK and worldwide. In the event of an infectious disease outbreak, control strategies are used to try and minimise the impact of the epidemic. The aim of adaptive management is to gain information about an outbreak as it occurs in 'real-time', in order to implement the optimal control strategy for this unique outbreak.
Building from an existing meta-population model of an example infectious disease outbreak we will begin to investigate the impact of different infection control measures on the course of livestock infectious disease outbreaks. We plan to simulate the use of a number of potential control strategies at a variety of time-points throughout an epidemic to see what effect this has on a number management objectives of interest.
This framework will then be built upon existing livestock infectious disease models such as those for foot-and-mouth disease and avian influenza, in order to inform policymakers and decision makers about the optimal ways to deal with an infectious disease prior to an outbreak occurring.
Alongside the modelling of adaptive management strategies, we will also develop interactive computer applications that are designed to make infectious disease modelling results more accessible to decision makers.
This will take the form of applications that run simple and faster infectious disease models within them, where individuals can interact through various menus and selection boxes to change model parameters and explore how these results change model outputs or applications ready loaded with simulation data to allow individuals to interactively change certain criteria to automatically produce visualisations of results.