African swine fever (ASF) has been present in the European Union and has spread within the wild boar population since 2014. Infected wild boars represent the main reservoir of the virus in Europe and one of the main pathways for its introduction into the pig industry from both infected and non-infected member state. A number of control measures (eg hunting, fences) have been implemented to slow down the rate of disease spread but their cost-effectiveness are debatable. Currently there is no vaccine available against ASF to prevent animals to be infected but work on a number of candidates formulation are on-going in Europe and abroad. Some of these vaccine candidates are designed to be primarily administered to wild boars; however, there is limited information on the vaccine characteristics that would provide sufficient protection in wild boar and control ASF in such populations, hence limiting the risk of spill over into the domestic pig industry.

A part of the Chair in Veterinary Public Health, and in collaboration with the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the French Office for Biodiversity (OFB), an individual-based simulation model, coupling disease and animal population dynamics, has been developed to investigate how the social organization of a wild boar population may influence the transmission dynamics of ASF and impact its invasion risk and persistence in a given wild boar population. This model has been parameterised with age-, size- and sex-specific demographic rates estimated from a 40-year monitoring of a free-ranging wild boar population.

In this PhD project we will extend this individual-based simulation model to evaluate the impact of various intervention strategies using vaccination to control infectious diseases in natural wild boar populations. Vaccine efficacy will be modulated to identify which combination of vaccine characteristics may optimise proactive and reactive interventions. Here, we will focus on five (5) vaccine characteristics: degree of induced protection, time to induced protection, reduction in transmissibility, duration of the sustained protection and biological stability.

Objectives

1. Model the impact of proactive and reactive vaccination strategies targeting wild boar population, in combination with other control interventions, to control ASF transmission in Europe
2. Define the optimum combination in ASF vaccine characteristics to control the spread ASF in a given wild boar population.