Bovine TB is a major problem for the agricultural industry in severalcountries. TB can be contracted and spread by species other than cattle andthis can cause a problem for disease control. In the UK and Ireland, badgersare a recognised reservoir of infection and there has been substantialdiscussion about potential control strategies. We present a coupling ofindividual based models of bovine TB in badgers and cattle, which aims tocapture the key details of the natural history of the disease and of bothspecies at approximately county scale. The model is spatially explicit itfollows a very large number of cattle and badgers on a different grid size foreach species and includes also winter housing. We show that the model canreplicate the reported dynamics of both cattle and badger populations as wellas the increasing prevalence of the disease in cattle. Parameter space used asinput in simulations was swept out using Latin hypercube sampling andsensitivity analysis to model outputs was conducted using mixed effect models.By exploring a large and computationally intensive parameter space we show thatof the available control strategies it is the frequency of TB testing andwhether or not winter housing is practised that have the most significanteffects on the number of infected cattle, with the effect of winter housingbecoming stronger as farm size increases. Whether badgers were culled or notexplained about 5%, while the accuracy of the test employed to detect infectedcattle explained less than 3% of the variance in the number of infected cattle.
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