Quantification of the animal tuberculosis multi-host community offers insights for control

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Nuno
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Richomme, Céline, Nunes, Telmo, Vicente, Joaquín, Alves, Paulo C., de la Fuente, José, Correia-Neves, M, Boschiroli, María-Laura, Delahay, Richard, Gortázar, Christian
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/65861
• topic: mycobacterium bovis; disease eradication; livestock; wild animals; stochastic models; Ciências Médicas::Ciências da Saúde

Animal tuberculosis (TB) is a multi-host zoonotic disease whose prevalence in cattle herds in Europe has been increasing, despite a huge investment in eradication. The composition of the host community is a fundamental driver of pathogen transmission, and yet this has not been formally quantified for animal TB in Europe. We quantified multi-host communities of animal TB, using stochastic models to estimate the number of infected domestic and wild hosts in three regions: officially TB-free Central–Western Europe, and two largely TB-endemic regions, the Iberian Peninsula and Britain and Ireland. We show that the estimated number of infected animals in the three regions was 290,059–1,605,612 and the numbers of infected non-bovine domestic and wild hosts always exceeded those of infected cattle, with ratios ranging from 3.3 (1.3–19.6):1 in Britain and Ireland to 84.3 (20.5–864):1 in the Iberian Peninsula. Our results illustrate for the first time the extent to which animal TB systems in some regions of Europe are dominated by non-bovine domestic and wild species. These findings highlight the need to adapt current strategies for effective future control of the disease.