Detecting superspreaders in wildlife reservoirs of disease

Wild animals commonly harbour infectious diseases with risk of spillover to humans and livestock. Identifying superspreaders, those individuals most responsible for onward transmission of infection, is critical for disease management but challenging in practice, since monitoring relies on imperfect surveillance and diagnostic testing. We fitted an individual-level stochastic spatial meta-population model of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) transmission to data from a long-term longitudinal study of the European badger (Meles meles). We develop a novel estimator for the individual effective reproduction number, providing quantitative evidence for the presence of superspreader badgers, despite the population-level effective reproduction number being less than one. Control of bTB in badgers could be substantially increased by targeting interventions at the individuals responsible for most onward transmission. Our framework provides an efficient and generalisable means of fitting state-space models to individual-level data, to identify high-risk individuals and explore important epidemiological questions. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.