The publication earlier this month in Nature by Ellen Brooks Pollock (Cambridge), Gareth Roberts (Statistics) and Matt Keeling (Mathematics and Life Sciences) of their joint paper has stirred up a great deal of interest not just in the scientific community but also the daily newspapers and BBC TV news.

This work was begun in 2008 and follows on from other successful research at Warwick and Cambridge on both bovine TB and modelling livestock infections. This is the first time that anyone has developed a mechanistic mathematical national-scale model for the spread of bovine TB that accounts for multiple routes of transmission and allows the impact of different controls to be tested.

Their model shows that transmission is complex and multifaceted – with cattle-to-cattle transmission, failure to detect infection, movement of infected animals and transmission from the environment all playing a role. The authors believe it is this complexity that continues to fuel scientific and public debate about bovine TB.

Links:
Nature article: A dynamic model of bovine tuberculosis spread and control in Great Britain
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