Estimating the transmission parameters of foot-and-mouth disease in Vietnam: A spatial-dynamic kernel-based model with outbreak and host data.

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) affects cloven-hoofed livestock and causes devastating damages to the world's economies. Being endemic in developing countries, FMD has imposed a significant threat to the FMD-freedom status in developed countries. The globally-concerted effort to eradicate FMD at its source has faced a substantial challenge of having little knowledge about how FMD spreads in developing countries.

A cost-benefit analysis of Vietnam's 2006-2010 foot-and-mouth disease control program.

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is arguably the most damaging animal disease, affecting three-quarters of the global livestock population. This paper provides a cost-benefit analysis of the first five-year program that used vaccination to contain and control FMD in an endemic country, Vietnam. Our spatial and dynamic model to simulate FMD outbreaks fully considered the distance among livestock premises, their herd sizes, and composition, all of which significantly affect FMD transmission.

Assessing biophysical and socio-economic impacts of climate change on regional avian biodiversity.

Climate change threatens biodiversity directly by influencing biophysical variables that drive species' geographic distributions and indirectly through socio-economic changes that influence land use patterns, driven by global consumption, production and climate. To date, no detailed analyses have been produced that assess the relative importance of, or interaction between, these direct and indirect climate change impacts on biodiversity at large scales. Here, we apply a new integrated modelling framework to quantify the relative influence of biophysical and socio-economically mediated impacts on avian species in Vietnam and Australia and we find that socio-economically mediated impacts on suitable ranges are largely outweighed by biophysical impacts.

Application of WRF-Chem to simulate air quality over Northern Vietnam.

The WRF-Chem (Weather Research and Forecasting with Chemistry) model is implemented and validated against ground-based observations for meteorological and atmospheric variables for the first time in Northern Vietnam. The WRF-Chem model was based on HTAPv2 emission inventory with MOZCART chemical-aerosol mechanism to simulate atmospheric variables for winter (January) and summer (July) of 2014. The model satisfactorily reproduces meteorological fields, such as temperature 2 m above the ground and relative humidity 2 m above the ground at 45 NCHMF meteorological stations in January, but lower agreement was found in those simulations of July.

Early Decision Indicators for Foot-and-Mouth Disease Outbreaks in Non-Endemic Countries.

Disease managers face many challenges when deciding on the most effective control strategy to manage an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD). Decisions have to be made under conditions of uncertainty and where the situation is continually evolving. In addition, resources for control are often limited.