| Control of emerging animal diseases critically depends on their early detection. However, designing surveillance programs for exotic and emerging diseases is very challenging because of knowledge gaps on the probability of incursion and mechanisms of spread. Using the example of Bluetongue Virus, which is exotic to the UK, we develop a metapopulation epidemic-economic modelling framework that considers the incursion, detection, spread and control of a disease in a livestock production system composed of heterogeneous subpopulations. The model is then embedded in an information gap (info-gap) framework to assess the robustness of surveillance and vaccination policies to unacceptable outbreaks losses and applied to the case of Bluetongue in the UK. The... |
