Surveillance of animal diseases through implementation of a Bayesian spatio-temporal model: A simulation example with neurological syndromes in horses and West Nile Virus
Journal article, 2019

A potentially sensitive way to detect disease outbreaks is syndromic surveillance, i.e. monitoring the number of syndromes reported in the population of interest, comparing it to the baseline rate, and drawing conclusions about outbreaks using statistical methods. A decision maker may use the results to take disease control actions or to initiate enhanced epidemiological investigations. In addition to the total count of syndromes there are often additional pieces of information to consider when assessing the probability of an outbreak. This includes clustering of syndromes in space and time as well as historical data on the occurrence of syndromes, seasonality of the disease, etc. In this paper, we show how Bayesian theory for syndromic surveillance applies to the occurrence of neurological syndromes in horses in France. Neurological syndromes in horses may be connected e.g. to West Nile Virus (WNV), a zoonotic disease of growing concern for public health in Europe. A Bayesian method for spatio-temporal cluster detection of syndromes and for determining the probability of an outbreak is presented. It is shown how surveillance can be performed simultaneously for a specific class of diseases (WNV or diseases similar to WNV in terms of the information available to the system) and a non-specific class of diseases (not similar to WNV in terms of the information available to the system). We also discuss some new extensions to the spatio-temporal models and the computational algorithms involved. It is shown step-by-step how data from historical WNV outbreaks and surveillance data for neurological syndromes can be used for model construction. The model is implemented using a Gibbs sampling procedure, and its sensitivity and specificity is evaluated. Finally, it is illustrated how predictive modelling of syndromes can be useful for decision making in animal health surveillance.

Hidden markov model

Spatio-temporal model

Bayesian model

Gibbs sampling

Syndromic surveillance

West Nile Virus

Author

Ronny Hedell

Chalmers, Mathematical Sciences, Applied Mathematics and Statistics

Swedish National Forensic Centre

M.G. Andersson

Swedish National Veterinary Institute

Céline Faverjon

University of Bern

Christel Marcillaud-Pitel

RESPE (Réseau d’Epidémio-Surveillance en Pathologie Équine)

Agnès Leblond

Université de Lyon

Petter Mostad

Chalmers, Mathematical Sciences, Applied Mathematics and Statistics

Preventive Veterinary Medicine

0167-5877 (ISSN)

Vol. 162 95-106

Subject Categories

Biomedical Laboratory Science/Technology

Probability Theory and Statistics

DOI

10.1016/j.prevetmed.2018.11.010

More information

Latest update

9/13/2019