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ARS Home » Southeast Area » Fort Pierce, Florida » U.S. Horticultural Research Laboratory » Subtropical Plant Pathology Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #351871
Research Project: Mitigating High Consequence Domestic, Exotic, and Emerging Diseases of Fruits, Vegetables, and Ornamentals

Location: Subtropical Plant Pathology Research

Title: What makes or breaks a campaign to stop an invading plant pathogen?

Author
item MILNE, ALICE - Rothamsted Research
item VAN DEN BOSCH, FRANK - Curtin University
item Gottwald, Timothy
item PARNELL, STEPHEN - University Of Salford
item CHAVEZ, VASTHI - Rothamsted Research

Submitted to: PLoS Computational Biology
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 11/26/2019
Publication Date: 2/6/2020
Citation: Milne, A., van den Bosch, F., Gottwald, T.R., Parnell, S.R., Chavez, V.A. 2020. What makes or breaks a campaign to stop an invading plant pathogen? PLoS Computational Biology. 16(2):e1007570. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007570.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007570

Interpretive Summary: Diseases in humans, animals and plants remain an important challenge in our modern society. For agricultural diseases, many cannot be controlled by individual growers, but rather require the collective, concerted and coordinated action of a large group of stakeholders. For diseases that spread quickly over large regional areas, such as citrus huanglongbing (citrus greening) both biological and human behavioral factors influence the outcome of a disease control campaigns. That is, individual growers cannot hope to control the disease within their own farms, but must rely on coordination with other growers within the region to coordinate control. In mathematical models, that are frequently used to guide such control campaigns and disease control decision making, human behavior is rarely taken into account. It is however very well known that opinion is the driving factor of human decision making. In this manuscript we demonstrate how coupling a mathematical model with an opinion dynamic model (that takes into account individual and regional human opinions about disease control effectiveness and potential) more accurately portrays how an epidemic will progress. This allows us to address the title question: What makes or breaks a disease control campaign? For this paper we use the case study of citrus Huanglongbing disease as an example. This modeling methodology presents a new extension to epidemiological modeling and helps determine if disease control of regional diseases will be successful or not. It also provides a tool to extension and regulatory agencies to improve effectiveness of control/mitigation/eradication programs.

Technical Abstract: Diseases in humans, animals and plants remain an important challenge in our modern society. Effective disease control often requires coordinated concerted action of a large group of stakeholders. Both epidemiological and human behavioural factors influence the outcome of a disease control campaign. In mathematical models, that are frequently used to guide such control campaigns, human behaviour is often ill represented, if at all. Existing models of human, animal and plant disease that do incorporate participation or compliance are exclusively driven by (i) pay-offs or (ii) direct observations of the disease state of the population (Manfredi et al. 2010, Milne et al. 2015). It is however very well known that opinion is the driving factor of human decision making (Kaur et al., 2013). Here we show how coupling an epidemiological model with an opinion dynamic model it is possible to answer the question: What makes or breaks a disease control campaign? We use Huanglongbing disease of citrus as our case example.