Efficiency of spatio-temporal vaccination regimes in wildlife populations under different viral constraints

We use a spatially explicit, individual-based wild boar model that represents the ecology of the hosts and the epidemiology of CSF, both on a regional scale and on the level of individual course of infection. We simulate adaptive spatial vaccination schemes accounting for the acute spread of an outbreak while using the temporal vaccination protocol proposed in the Community guidelines.Vaccination was found to be beneficial in a wide range of scenarios. We show that the short-term proactive component of a vaccination strategy is not only as decisive as short-term continuity, but also that it can outcompete alternative practices while being practically feasible. Furthermore, we show that under certain virus-host conditions vaccination might actually contribute to disease persistence in local populations.Disease outbreaks in wildlife populations often have huge economic consequences for the livestock industry [1,2] or pose an enormous risk to public health [3-6]. Managing diseases in wildlife populations is therefore of paramount importance [7]. Oral mass treatment is one method of choice in wildlife disease control [8-12]. Mass vaccination, for example, has largely succeeded in eradicating rabies in Central Europe [13-15]. Although the success of large-scale control efforts has been demonstrated repeatedly in the field [16-20], other studies show that wildlife diseases persisted for decades despite huge control efforts [21,22].In contingency strategy planning, research has very much focused on the level of treatment coverage required for herd-immunity or disease fade-out [23-29] or on temporal aspects such as the timing of campaigns in relation to seasonal reproduction in wildlife [20,29-34]. Particularly in the design of wildlife mass treatment programmes spatial aspects may play an important role in relation to species' dispersal abilities, spatial heterogeneity and spatio-temporal disease spread [35-37]. Integrating existing knowledge of the host's ecology and beha