Modelos biológicos aplicados a la sanidad animal

Abstract

The main line of investigation of this thesis centres on research into and the development of biological models for populations of wild boar (Sus scrofa Linnaeus, 1758), a widespread terrestrial mammal that acts as a potential host and reservoir for many swine diseases, such as Classical Swine Fever, Aujeszky disease, Food and Mouth Disease or Brucellosis. These models concentrate on African Swine Fever (ASF), a disease of mandatory notification of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) that is one of the most complex and significant from a sanitary-economic perspective of all maladies affecting the world’s pig-farming industry. Since its appearance in Georgia in 2007, the rapid spread of the ASF virus (ASFV) through Eastern Europe, coupled with the failure to prevent its spread and its reappearance in EU countries in 2014, has meant that the global sanitary alert level for this virus has had to be raised. Wild boar seem to have played an active role in the ASF epidemic in Eastern Europe and are known to be one of the factors behind the persistence of this disease in endemic areas (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine) and its introduction and local spread in UE countries (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland). Thus, EU countries are now having to face up to a novel epidemiological situation and the challenge of halting the spread of ASF, a disease that until relatively recently had been somewhat overlooked. Three main entry routes for ASFV into disease-free countries are envisaged, of which the most difficult to control is its spread due to the natural movements of wild boar, an animal that knows no barely barriers or political frontiers. Knowledge of the large-scale distribution of wild boar – information that was not available when this thesis was begun – will be essential if effective programmes for preventing, monitoring and controlling the spread of ASF are to be implemented. To anticipate the distribution of the disease on a broad scale, veterinary epidemiology must begin to use tools from a biological standpoint that are based on geographical ecology and up-to-date data sources. Today, the evolution of Geographical Information Systems, technical advances in teledetection platforms capable of handling large quantities of environmental information (climate, topography, plant cover, etc.) and the development of applied statistical techniques all provide a solid base for estimating the distribution of this species. In this thesis I thus attempt to use and expand the possibilities offered by species distribution models in order to respond to some of the problems currently arising in veterinary epidemiology...