Review A review of geospatial and ecological factors affecting disease spread in wild pigs: Considerations for models of foot-and-mouth disease spread Brendan Cowled * , Graeme Garner Office of the Chief Veterinary Officer, Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, GPO Box 858, Canberra 2601, Australia Received 20 November 2007; received in revised form 18 March 2008; accepted 29 March 2008 Abstract Around the world, wild boar or feral pigs are infected by a range of infectious organisms with important, productivity, public health or economic consequences. Consequently, the potential role of wild pigs in outbreaks of important exotic diseases, like foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), has been a significant consideration in many countries. Disease modelling is one means to study the epidemiology of disease and has been used to assess the potential role of wild pigs in FMD incursions. Many of these models have been strategic in nature. They have contributed to a broad understanding of disease control in wild pigs (e.g. the concept of threshold densities and the need to cull pigs below this density for disease fadeout to occur), but have not incorporated many of the key drivers affecting disease behaviour. Some of these drivers include important ecological, behavioural and geospatial relationships, such as interaction between different host species and the distribution, density and connectivity of pig populations. New approaches to modelling disease spread such as spatial simulation models use spatial data and explicitly incorporate geospatial relationships. These approaches can provide useful quantitative models that can be used to explore mitigation strategies under specific disease outbreak conditions. However, to date, most studies have been limited by inadequate data, and computational issues or have not explored mitigation strategies. To inform management strategies for emergency epidemics such as FMD in wild pigs, there is scope to further develop and use models to explore a range of incursion scenarios and investigate the efficacy of different mitigation strategies. Crown Copyright # 2008 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Feral pigs; Wild boar; Disease; Models; Review; Geospatial; Ecology; Foot-and-mouth disease www.elsevier.com/locate/prevetmed Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Preventive Veterinary Medicine 87 (2008) 197–212 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +61 2 6272 5383; fax: +61 2 6272 3150. E-mail address: brendan.cowled@daff.gov.au (B. Cowled). 0167-5877/$ – see front matter. Crown Copyright # 2008 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.prevetmed.2008.03.012