Data from: Raccoon contact networks predict seasonal susceptibility to rabies outbreaks and limitations of vaccination

1. Infectious disease transmission often depends on the contact structure
of host populations. Although it is often challenging to capture the
contact structure in wild animals, new technology has enabled biologists
to obtain detailed temporal information on wildlife social contacts. In
this study, we investigated the effects of raccoon contact patterns on
rabies spread using network modelling. 2. Raccoons (Procyon lotor) play an
important role in the maintenance of rabies in the United States. It is
crucial to understand how contact patterns influence the spread of rabies
in raccoon populations in order to design effective control measures and
to prevent transmission to human populations and other animals. 3. We
constructed a dynamic system of contact networks based on empirical data
from proximity logging collars on a wild suburban raccoon population and
then simulated rabies spread across these networks. Our contact networks
incorporated the number and duration of raccoon interactions. We included
differences in contacts according to sex and season, and both short-term
acquaintances and long-term associations. Raccoons may display different
behaviours when infectious, including aggression (furious behaviour) and
impaired mobility (dumb behaviour); the network model was used to assess
the impact of potential behavioural changes in rabid raccoons. We also
tested the effectiveness of different vaccination coverage levels. 4. Our
results demonstrate that when rabies enters a suburban raccoon population,
the likelihood of a disease outbreak affecting the majority of the
population is high. Both the magnitude of rabies outbreaks and the speed
of rabies spread depend strongly on the time of year that rabies is
introduced into the population. When there is a combination of dumb and
furious behaviours in the rabid raccoon population, there are similar
outbreak sizes and speed of spread to when there are no behavioural
changes due to rabies infection. 5. By incorporating detailed data
describing the variation in raccoon contact rates into a network modelling
approach, we were able to show that suburban raccoon populations are
highly susceptible to rabies outbreaks, that the risk of large outbreaks
varies seasonally and that current vaccination target levels may be
inadequate to prevent the spread of rabies within these populations. Our
findings provide new insights into rabies dynamics in raccoon populations
and have important implications for disease control.