Andrzej Jarynowski

Author(s):
Viitaly Belik, FU Berlin

Abstract title:
Possible effect on border fencing and animal corridors blocking on African Swine Fever (ASF) Virus propagation in Poland

Abstract:
We analyze 3487 ASF notification in Poland from February 2014 to April 2019 (50 out of 380 poviats have been affected and due to restrictions, almost 90% of farms in affected area stopped pig production) comprising event time, longitude and latitude (within the administrative unit of poviat), where at least one house swine or wild boar case was reported. We choose a pseudo gravity propagation model for future projection of disease spread taking into account: pig abundance (pork production chain), disease vectors (wild boar) density, and human failures to restrictions. We propose a multilayer approach to heuristic analysis of these 3 layers of networks related to disease propagation.
To verify a possible effect of the fence, we quantify the difference in transmission dynamics between regions at the country border (immigration hypothesis) and in the interior regions (endemicity hypothesis) and no significant difference between border and interior countries was observed. Additionally, we test a scenario in which all border poviats are disconnected on wild boars network layer. There is only a small difference in the arrival time to “Polish swine hot spot”, because most of the dynamics is currently happening on the West of the border counties.
To verify a possible effect of blocking animal corridors, we test a scenario in which all poviats on A1 motorway are disconnected on the outgoing wild boars layer. There is an important difference in the arrival time to “Polish swine hot spot”. This estimation seems to be in agreement with observed propagation in Baltic States (e.g. via Baltica and A1 in Lithuania).
It is important to mention, that our methodology capture only the upper limit of a theoretically perfect barrier and more analysis in realistic scenario is required.