Confronto tra contatti diretti ed indiretti fra allevamenti, nella trasmissione della brucellosi bovina in Sicilia

This work aims to investigate the routes of transmission of bovine brucellosis in the Italian region of Sicily. We studied the role of two transmission mechanisms in spreading the disease, one related to the cattle trade and the other purely spatial that wants to capture aspects related to territorial factors. The goal is to assert how much these two mechanism are capable to generate the epidemic scenario considered for this study. We used network theory as mathematical formalism to model spreading mechanisms because this was useful for a computational approach. To achieve our goal we used and upgraded the Python-based tool INoDS which allowed us to obtain indicators that relate our contact networks to the observed epidemic scenario. All data used refers to the period from January 1 2006 to December 31 2012 and was considered all the infected cases from any brucella strain. We analyzed relations between our results and territorial aspects that refers to pastures distribution in Sicily.