Identification of Super-Spreaders of Foot-and-Mouth Disease in the cattle transportation network: The 2018 outbreak case in Cesar (Colombia)

Cattle movement represents one of the principal risks for foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) propagation. The characterization of this complex transportation network may aid in surveillance and control tasks. In particular, network centrality may provide relevant information for FMD epidemiology. Several centrality measures can be computed for the cattle transportation network, where each of them may provide useful information about the animal movement dynamic. Considering a single centrality measure is of limited use because it may not provide enough information to prioritize critical nodes in the transportation network related to FMD propagation. In this work, the identification of the so-called super-spreaders for FMD is considered in the cattle transportation network. The super-spreaders are nodes that can maximize their impact on the complete network. These nodes were identified by aggregating multiple centrality measures computed on each node (that include degree and betweenness centrality, among other). By using this approach, a ranking of nodes with high susceptibility for the propagation of FMD is constructed. Our results show that the identification of super-spreaders nodes in the cattle transportation network provides extremely valuable information related to highly susceptible areas when studying FMD propagation. Remarkably, the proposed approach, adjusted with historical data from 2016 cattle movements, is able to properly identify highly-critical regions that were later affected by a recently FMD outbreak in the region of Cesar (Colombia) during 2018.