Contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP) is a disease that causes high morbidity and mortality losses to cattle. The financial implications of these losses are of great significance to cattle owners. Control of CBPP is therefore important as a way to salvage the losses and increase the incomes of cattle owners. This study estimated the economic cost of CBPP and the benefits of its control in tw...

Mycoplasma mycoides subsp. mycoides is generally considered one of most pathogenic Mycoplasma species, and it is the etiological agent of contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP). Here, we present the annotated genome sequence of M. mycoides subsp. mycoides Italian strain 57/13, isolated in 1992 during CBPP outbreaks in Italy.

With rapidly increasing herd sizes, focus on contagious udder pathogens becomes important. Based on a yearly test of bulk tank milk in Danish dairy herds, the prevalence of herds infected with Streptococcus agalactiae (S. agalactiae) increased from 2 % in 2000 to 7 % in 2010, while approximately 90 % of the herds were positive for Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) (Katholm, et al., 2012). The r...

On the basis of observational and experimental evidence, several authors have proposed that contagious yawn is linked to our capacity for empathy, thus presenting a powerful tool to explore the root of empathy in animal evolution. The evidence for the occurrence of contagious yawning and its link to empathy, however, is meagre outside primates and only recently domestic dogs have demonstrated t...

We study the activation process in undirected graphs known as bootstrap percolation: a vertex is active either if it belongs to a set of initially activated vertices or if at some point it had at least r active neighbors, for a threshold r that is identical for all vertices. A contagious set is a vertex set whose activation results with the entire graph being active. Let m(G, r) be the size of ...

Executive Summary Currency crises tend to be regional. Since macroeconomic and financial phenomena are not regional, these phenomena are unimportant in understanding why crises spread. But international trade is regional, as countries tend to trade with their neighbors. This suggests that trade links are important in understanding how currency crises spread, above and beyond any macroeconomic p...

We consider the following activation process in undirected graphs: a vertex is active either if it belongs to a set of initially activated vertices or if at some point it has at least 2 active neighbors. A contagious set is a set whose activation results with the entire graph being active. Given a graph G, let m(G, 2) be the minimal size of a contagious set. We consider the binomial random grap...