(ORT) and (PM) are two major bacterial pathogens affecting the United States (US) commercial turkey industry. This retrospective observational case-case study aimed to investigate the association between land cover and confirmed disease occurrences attributed to PM or ORT in commercial turkey sites located in the Midwestern US A total of 65 farms from one poultry production company were included, where 28 had PM disease occurrences and 37 had ORT disease occurrences between 2014 and 2021. Risk factors of interest included land cover types (wetlands, forest, urban, pasture, herbaceous, barren, shrub), poultry-farm density in the area, and season and year of confirmed outbreak(s).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSanborn Fire Insurance maps contain a wealth of building-level information about U.S. cities dating back to the late 19th century.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe dynamics of infectious diseases are greatly influenced by the movement of both susceptible and infected hosts. To accurately represent disease dynamics among a mobile host population, detailed movement models have been coupled with disease transmission models. However, a number of different host movement models have been proposed, each with their own set of assumptions and results that differ from the other models.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDue to the complexity and multidimensional characteristics of human activities, assessing the similarity of human activity patterns and classifying individuals with similar patterns remains highly challenging. This paper presents a new and unique methodology for evaluating the similarity among individual activity patterns. It conceptualizes multidimensional sequence alignment (MDSA) as a multiobjective optimization problem, and solves this problem with an evolutionary algorithm.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFModeling the movements of humans and animals is critical to understanding the transmission of infectious diseases in complex social and ecological systems. In this paper, we focus on the movements of pastoralists in the Far North Region of Cameroon, who follow an annual transhumance by moving between rainy and dry season pastures. Describing, summarizing, and modeling the transhumance movements in the region are important steps for understanding the role these movements may play in the transmission of infectious diseases affecting humans and animals.
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