Figure 2

Comparison of conventional and novel network structures for cattle movement data. The "Movement data" box contains a fictional list of 7 dated cattle movements. These can be built into a conventional contact network (blue network) of 5 nodes and 7 edges. The networks built according to our novel procedure (see Text) are shown in the yellow diagram. There are 7 nodes. The 7-day infection network has 3 edges (the dashed edge is excluded by the time limit of 7 days between a movement on to location E and a movement off again, with location E being a farm). The 14-day infection network has 4 edges, inclusive of the dashed edge. The movement data defines contacts between pairs of locations; our procedure is designed to define meaningful routes of contact involving at least 3 locations. As can be seen from the coloured boxes, the conventional network provides 9 routes involving three distinct locations, whereas our networks show that only 1 (on the 7-day network) or at most 2 such routes are actually realistic routes for disease transmission.