O8-1 T-Racing: a contact tracing tool for supporting epidemiological investigation during livestock disease outbreaks

Abstract

A user-friendly web application (T-Racing) was developed in an R environment to support epidemiological investigations through interacting maps, network graphs, and tables. The application relies on Temporal Network Analysis techniques and accounts for the dynamic nature of animal trade, to perform a quick and efficient back and forward tracing activity. T-Racing makes use of web services to retrieve data from diverse Official National Databases, through the plumber package and has been distributed using Shinyproxy. Movement data underlying the spatial-temporal tracing pattern can be explored according to time frame, animal species, movement to slaughterhouses, and movements in and out of the selected farm. The forward/backward search can be performed from one or more farms, selected among those which had moved animals or notified outbreak of disease within a selected time frame and or falling in a user-defined spatial buffer. Considering search results may often involve thousands of farms/movements (which would not be possible to visualize or use, when many), the T- Racing application is able to provide tools that may interactively and iteratively handle huge networks. Users can add or remove links/nodes according to epidemiological information and/or spatial location, node’s property, and network deepness,to get the most relevant results, including paths among outbreaks caused by genetically similar pathogens. Moreover, the result can be restricted to paths followed by single identified animals linked to the seeds. This tool may strongly support animal disease control measures since it can rapidly organize essential contact information from large datasets, and identify connections in a multi-area outbreak investigation thus supporting the epidemiological investigation.

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