On the question of proportionality of the count of observed Scrapie cases and the size of holding

Abstract

Background: The present paper investigates the question of a suitable basic model for the number of scrapie cases in a holding and applications of this knowledge to the estimation of scrapieaffected holding population sizes and adequacy of control measures within holding. Is the number of scrapie cases proportional to the size of the holding in which case it should be incorporated into the parameter of the error distribution for the scrapie counts? Or, is there a different -potentially more complex -relationship between case count and holding size in which case the information about the size of the holding should be better incorporated as a covariate in the modeling?