In the last two decades, global livestock production has dramatically shifted from traditionally pastoral systems towards high density, confined livestock productions and commercial agribusiness. The FAO reports that intensive farming units are replacing traditional grazing units at a rate of 4% per year. Livestock production intensification is likely to alter regional infectious disease dynamics. Known spillover events from livestock populations to wildlife populations and vice versa have had devastating consequences for population survival. Three-quarters of pathogens that infect livestock are generalist species and are capable of infecting a variety of animals including other livestock species, wildlife species, and/or humans. Using a stochastic, spatially-explicit epidemiological model of disease propagation, we assess the probability of spillover events between livestock pathogens to susceptible human and wildlife populations across a variety of animal husbandry practices.

Results/Conclusions

Our metapopulation approach allows us to tease apart differences of within-species and between-species disease dynamics. We then test whether confinement and restricted movement of livestock have altered epidemic duration or final outbreak size for livestock and wildlife populations. These results are directly applicable to a range of communicable livestock diseases capable of infecting a range of hosts, including bovine tuberculosis, foot and mouth disease, brucellosis and rinderpest, diseases which threaten cattle as well as proximal wild ungulate populations.