Livestock market data for modeling disease spread among US cattle

Transportation of livestock carries the risk of spreading foreign animal diseases, leading to costly public and private sector expenditures on disease containment and eradication. Livestock movement tracing systems in Europe, Australia and Japan have allowed epidemiologists to model the risks engendered by transportation of live animals and prepare responses designed to protect the livestock industry. Within the US, data on livestock movement is not sufficient for direct parameterization of models for disease spread, but network models that assimilate limited data provide a path forward in model development to inform preparedness for disease outbreaks in the US. Here, we develop a novel data stream, the information publicly reported by US livestock markets on the origin of cattle consigned at live auctions, and demonstrate the potential for estimating a national-scale network model of cattle movement. By aggregating auction reports generated weekly at markets in several states, including some archived reports spanning several years, we obtain a market-oriented sample of edges from the dynamic cattle transportation network in the US. We first propose a sampling framework that allows inference about shipments originating from operations not explicitly sampled and consigned at non-reporting livestock markets in the US, and we report key predictors that are influential in extrapolating beyond our opportunistic sample. As a demonstration of the utility gained from the data and fitted parameters, we model the critical role of market biosecurity procedures in the context of a spatially homogeneous but temporally dynamic representation of cattle movements following an introduction of a foreign animal disease. We conclude that auction market data fills critical gaps in our ability to model intrastate cattle movement for infectious disease dynamics, particularly with an ability to addresses the capacity of markets to amplify or control a livestock disease outbreak.\n\nAuthor SummaryWe have automated the collection of previously unavailable cattle movement data, allowing us to aggregate details on the origins of cattle sold at live-auction markets in the US. Using our novel dataset, we demonstrate potential to infer a complete dynamic transportation network that would drive disease transmission in models of potential US livestock epidemics.