AUTHOR=Lange Martin , Kramer-Schadt Stephanie , Thulke Hans-Hermann TITLE=Relevance of Indirect Transmission for Wildlife Disease Surveillance JOURNAL=Frontiers in Veterinary Science VOLUME=Volume 3 - 2016 YEAR=2016 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/veterinary-science/articles/10.3389/fvets.2016.00110 DOI=10.3389/fvets.2016.00110 ISSN=2297-1769 ABSTRACT=
Epidemiological models of infectious diseases are essential tools in support of risk assessment, surveillance design, and contingency planning in public and animal health. Direct pathogen transmission from host to host is an essential process of each host–pathogen system and respective epidemiological modeling concepts. It is widely accepted that numerous diseases involve indirect transmission (IT) through pathogens shed by infectious hosts to their environment. However, epidemiological models largely do not represent pathogen persistence outside the host explicitly. We hypothesize that this simplification might bias management-related model predictions for disease agents that can persist outside their host for a certain time span. We adapted an individual-based, spatially explicit epidemiological model that can mimic both transmission processes. One version explicitly simulated indirect pathogen transmission through a contaminated environment. The second version simulated direct host-to-host transmission only. We aligned the model variants by the transmission potential per infectious host (i.e., basic reproductive number