Roadmap for development of disease control strategies for bTB

What are we trying to achieve and why? What is the problem we are trying to solve?

• Can we estimate and monitor R0 for infection within the cattle population and different wildlife populations, badgers, wild boar, deer etc.?
• What is the R0 value of intraspecies and interspecies transmission in the various TB epi-systems?
• Can we investigate whether control measures impact system R0?
• If the R0 value is less than 1 then infection will die out within a population. For wildlife populations this will indicate if they are potentially long-term maintenance hosts.
• Herd management procedure will impact on transmission within a herd or population.

What are the scientific and technological challenges (knowledge gaps needing to be addressed)?

• Challenge to obtain animal- or herd-level cattle data and samples if required.
• Challenge to obtain animal-level wildlife data or samples if required.
• Challenging to undertake sufficiently powered, well controlled and replicated studies.
• Expensive transmission experiments to obtain data. Establishing if signal of super-shedder herd and/or animals within livestock and/or wildlife hosts; what is the impact of their removal?

What approaches could/should be taken to address the research question?

• Require detailed herd- or animal-level cattle data and samples over time in sufficiently powered, controlled, and replicated field studies.
• Require animal- or group-level wildlife data and samples over time in study areas.
• Mathematical/epidemiological modelling, including transmission dynamics (phylodynamics) studies.
• Large scale longitudinal studies monitoring natural infection in various species and contexts.

What else needs to be done before we can solve this need?

Existing knowledge including successes and failures