Abstract
BACKGROUND: African swine fever (ASF) is a devastating infectious disease of pigs. ASF poses a potential threat to the world pig industry, due to the lack of vaccines and treatments. In this study, the Geographic Information System (GIS) spatial analysis was applied to analyze the distribution, dispersion of the epidemic and clustering of ASF in Poland. RESULTS: The results show that the center of the epidemic moved gradually towards the southwest, and the distribution of the epidemic changed from south-north to east-west. Through space-time scan statistical analysis, the 3 clusters major of wild boar cases involve longer time spans and larger radii, while the other five with higher relative risks involved in domestic pigs. And then, a quantitative model was constructed to analyse the risk of releasing African swine fever virus (ASFV) from Poland by the legal export of pork and pork products. The Latin hypercube sampling results show that the probability is relatively low (the average value is 4.577 × 10(- 7)). CONCLUSIONS: All the identification of the spatio-temporal patterns of the epidemic and the risk analysis model would give a further understanding of the dynamics of disease transmission and help to design corresponding measures to minimize the catastrophic consequences of potential ASFV introduction.