title: Epidemiology and disease control in everyday beef practice.
abstract: It is important for food animal veterinarians to understand the interaction among animals, pathogens, and the environment, in order to implement herd-specific biosecurity plans. Animal factors such as the number of immunologically protected individuals influence the number of individuals that a potential pathogen is able to infect, as well as the speed of spread through a population. Pathogens differ in their virulence and contagiousness. In addition, pathogens have various methods of transmission that impact how they interact with a host population. A cattle population's environment includes its housing type, animal density, air quality, and exposure to mud or dust and other health antagonists such as parasites and stress; these environmental factors influence the innate immunity of a herd by their impact on immunosuppression. In addition, a herd's environment also dictates the "animal flow" or contact and mixing patterns of potentially infectious and susceptible animals. Biosecurity is the attempt to keep infectious agents away from a herd, state, or country, and to control the spread of infectious agents within a herd. Infectious agents (bacteria, viruses, or parasites) alone are seldom able to cause disease in cattle without contributing factors from other infectious agents and/or the cattle's environment. Therefore to develop biosecurity plans for infectious disease in cattle, veterinarians must consider the pathogen, as well as environmental and animal factors.
authors.affiliation: College of Veterinary Medicine, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506, USA. Rlarson@vet.ksu.edu
authors.forename: R L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Larson
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001424:Bacterial Infections / Q000517:prevention & control / Q000662:veterinary; D002417:Cattle; D002418:Cattle Diseases / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000276:immunology / Q000517:prevention & control; D010273:Parasitic Diseases, Animal / Q000517:prevention & control; D014777:Virus Diseases / Q000517:prevention & control / Q000662:veterinary