Analysis of patterns of livestock movements in the Cattle Corridor of Uganda for risk-based surveillance of infectious diseases

Introduction: The knowledge of animal movements is key to formulating strategic animal disease control policies and carrying out targeted surveillance. This study describes the characteristics of district-level cattle, small ruminant, and pig trade networks in the Cattle Corridor of Uganda between 2019 and 2021.

Methodology: The data for the study was extracted from 7,043 animal movement permits (AMPs) obtained from the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries (MAAIF) of Uganda. Most of the data was on cattle (87.2%), followed by small ruminants (11.2%) and pigs (1.6%). Two types of networks representing animal shipments between districts were created for each species based on monthly (n = 30) and seasonal (n = 10) temporal windows. Measures of centrality and cohesiveness were computed for all the temporal windows and our analysis identified the most central districts in the networks.

Results: The median in-degree for monthly networks ranged from 0–3 for cattle, 0–1 for small ruminants and 0–1 for pigs. The highest median out-degrees for cattle, small ruminant and pig monthly networks were observed in Lira, Oyam and Butambala districts, respectively. Unlike the pig networks, the cattle and small ruminant networks were found to be of small-world and free-scale topologies.

Discussion: The cattle and small ruminant trade movement networks were also found to be highly connected, which could facilitate quick spread of infectious animal diseases across these networks. The findings from this study highlighted the significance of characterizing animal movement networks to inform surveillance, early detection, and subsequent control of infectious animal disease outbreaks.