One to two decades ago, the Belgian pig industry has been confronted with several outbreaks of classical swine fever (CSF). Although the risk of CSF introduction is believed to be lower at this moment, it remains present. Therefore, vigilance for appearance of disease remains appropriate. Mathematical modelling of disease spread is a powerful tool to evaluate and compare potential control measures. Stochastic simulation modelling in pre-outbreak periods has several benefits in that repeated simulations of the same strategy allow the variability of predicted outcomes to be quantified. We used recent data of movement patterns between pig herds (Ribbens et al., 2008) to adapt a generic stochastic geographical simulation model (Interspread Plus, MasseyUniversity, New-Zealand). In this abstract the results of simulation modelling are used to estimate the number of infected herds after incursion of an undetected foreign epidemic disease (i.e. CSF) and to make predictions of the expected geographic distribution of infection.
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