Eight challenges in modelling infectious livestock diseases.

The transmission of infectious diseases of livestock does not differ in principle from disease transmission in any other animals, apart from that the aim of control is ultimately economic, with the influence of social, political and welfare constraints often poorly defined. Modelling of livestock diseases suffers simultaneously from a wealth and a lack of data. On the one hand, the ability to conduct transmission experiments, detailed within-host studies and track individual animals between geocoded locations make livestock diseases a particularly rich potential source of realistic data for illuminating biological mechanisms of transmission and conducting explicit analyses of contact networks. On the other hand, scarcity of funding, as compared to human diseases, often results in incomplete and partial data for many livestock diseases and regions of the world. In this overview of challenges in livestock disease modelling, we highlight eight areas unique to livestock that, if addressed, would mark major progress in the area.EBP is funded by EPSRC fellowship EP/H027270/1. MJK was supported by the ERA-NET anihwa call funded by Defra. JLNW is supported by the Alborada Trust, the RAPIDD program of the Science & Technology Directorate, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Fogarty International Center, U.S. National Institutes of Health, the European Union FP7 project ANTIGONE (contract number 278976) and by BBSRC grant BB/I012192/1.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.epidem.2014.08.00