Our farm networks are more connected than we think, and people movement may be a bigger risk for animal disease transmission than we realize.
It’s common knowledge that animal movement creates a risk of spreading disease through animal-to-animal contact, but the human factor is potentially equally or even more important.
What does the research say?
Dr. Tara Prezioso, DVM MPH at University of Illinois Department of Pathobiology, is working with a full year’s worth of movement data from three large swine systems. Anonymized data was provided by Farm Health Guardian for this research. The data represents movements in and out of 455 properties over a 12-month period and includes over 500,000 visits. The properties include finishing sites, sow barns, feed mills and truck washes. The visit types include people, livestock and deadstock trucks, feed trucks and service vehicles.
The goal is to develop a predictive analytics model to see where disease spread is likely to occur. It is expected that this will be a valuable tool with the potential to stop animal disease before it happens and prevent its spread.
Four groups of data, or subnetworks were created and compared:
- Full network (all movements included)
- Human network (employees, visitors, maintenance, etc.)
- Animal network (only livestock and deadstock truck movements)
- Truck network (only truck visits for which there is no human contact e.g. feed delivery)
“Monitoring human movement is just as or more important than monitoring animal movement alone.”
Prezioso aimed to see whether including the human movements into the network significantly changed the statistics and therefore how disease would spread. She theorized that a swine farm network including human movement will identify risk structures not present in animal movement networks alone. Her hypothesis: “Monitoring human movement is just as or more important than monitoring animal movement alone.”
Our networks are more connected than we think
Prezioso observed that there were more trips between farms than expected. The average number of trips (or visits to other properties) between any two properties is called an average path length. The lower the average path length, the more connected the network is. Based on Prezioso’s analysis, the longest path length of the full network is five, with an average path length of 2.202. A low average path length can mean that even less connected properties in the network are more vulnerable to disease.
The diagram below provides a visual of the high connection between networks, where each color represents groups of similar properties based on a mathematical algorithm, called communities. The grey lines represent trips between properties.
A low average path length can mean that even less connected properties in the network are more vulnerable to disease.
No more clipboards
Based on Prezioso’s observations, managing people movement and their access to facilities may be even more crucial than we realize.
Traditional systems like paper-based visitor logs are prone to error and visitor biosecurity practices are often applied inconsistently, leaving facilities vulnerable to disease spread from human movements.
Farm Health Guardian® Protocol® is a biosecurity management system that digitizes barn entry and gives farmers and food companies confidence in knowing and proactively controlling exactly who is allowed to go in and out of their facilities. It eliminates the human error inherent in other barn entry systems and paper-based record keeping.
Digitizing barn entry
Installed at key entryways, Protocol® Controlled Entry uses a digital facial template to authenticate a person entering a barn and either allow or deny entry based on biosecurity requirements such as downtime, visit history and health status.
The technology stops unauthorized people or those who do not meet biosecurity requirements before they enter the barn, helping to protect against disease spread.
When installed on downtime and disinfection (D&D) room doors, Protocol gives customers information and details about the cycle stage that barn workers otherwise have to guess at.
The stages give teams real-time visibility on the cycle status, with all users having access to the same information, giving transparency across different departments.
Controlling barn entry has come a long way from clipboards. For more information, visit farmhealthguardian.com.
