The 2001 epidemic of foot‐and‐mouth disease in the United Kingdom: epidemiological and meteorological case studies

Abstract

The possibility of the airborne spread of foot-and-mouth disease during the 2001 epidemic in the uk has been investigated in three epidemiological case studies. On the basis of evidence from field investigations, and a simple meteorological analysis, it is concluded that the spread of disease was consistent with the airborne transport of virus. The distances ranged from less than 1 km to 16 km; six of the farms were over 6 km from the source and involved the passage of virus over the sea combined with meteorological conditions which strongly favoured airborne disease transmission. The results of detailed atmospheric modelling demonstrated that airborne virus could have challenged livestock on all the farms studied. However, with one exception the 24-hour average daily concentrations of the virus were significantly below the experimentally estimated threshold for infection. A detailed model intercomparison established that, under stable atmospheric conditions, peak concentrations of virus up to two orders of magnitude higher might have been experienced for short periods, owing to fluctuations within the plume of virus, and model limitations. This finding would significantly reduce the apparent discrepancy between the experimentally estimated threshold for infection and the modelling results.

Understanding foot-and-mouth disease virus transmission biology: identification of the indicators of infectiousness

“…With such a small sample size the confidence limits are large, however, this possibly suggests that this is not a major route for disease spread between cattle, even though it appears to be an indicator of when an animal is infectious. Though the lack of airborne transmission might be due to the properties of this particular strain of virus as there was only a limited number of documented cases of airborne spread [40,41]. Planned future research will include more rigorous air sampling as these results suggest that air sampling shows great promise as a predictor of transmission and may also prove to be useful to detect preclinical infection.…”

The January 2006 low ozone event over the UK

“…Parameterizations also represent processes such as the entrainment between the boundary layer and the free troposphere, the mixing by deep convection, both wet and dry deposition, sedimentation and chemical destruction and creation. The model is routinely used in a wide range of applications: examples include the prediction of air quality levels based on thousands of UK and European anthropogenic and natural emissions, the transport and deposition of debris following the Chernobyl accident (Smith and Clark, 1989) and the airborne spread of foot and mouth disease during the epidemic in the UK in 2001 (Gloster et al, 2001).…”

The Air Spora

“…Animal reservoirs represent a potential source and means of spread, as shown by the outbreak of the H5N1 strain of avian 'flu in the Far East (Chen et al, 2004;Guan et al, 2004), while person to person spread via aerosol and droplets was an important factor in the newly emergent viral infection severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) Wang et al, 2005). Foot and mouth disease virus, although not a serious human pathogen, can cause heavy economic losses through livestock infection and the disease agent is readily disseminated over long distances via the airborne route (Donaldson and Alexandersen, 2002;Gloster et al, 2005).…”