A large-scale study of a poultry trading network in Bangladesh: implications for control and surveillance of avian influenza viruses

Since its first report in 2007, avian influenza (AI) has been endemic in Bangladesh. While live poultry marketing is widespread throughout the country and known to influence AI dissemination and persistence, trading patterns have not been described. The aim of this study is to assess poultry trading practices and features of the poultry trading networks which could promote AI spread, and their potential implications for disease control and surveillance. Data on poultry trading practices was collected from 849 poultry traders during a cross-sectional survey in 138 live bird markets (LBMs) across 17 different districts of Bangladesh. The quantity and origins of traded poultry were assessed for each poultry type in surveyed LBMs. The network of contacts between farms and LBMs resulting from commercial movements of live poultry was constructed to assess its connectivity and to identify the key premises influencing it

Competing biosecurity and risk rationalities in the Chittagong poultry commodity chain, Bangladesh

This paper anthropologically explores how key actors in the Chittagong live bird trading network perceive biosecurity and risk in relation to avian influenza between production sites, market maker scenes and outlets. They pay attention to the past and the present, rather than the future, downplaying the need for strict risk management, as outbreaks have not been reported frequently for a number of years. This is analysed as ‘temporalities of risk perception regarding biosecurity’, through Black Swan theory, the idea that unexpected events with major effects are often inappropriately rationalized (Taleb in The Black Swan. The impact of the highly improbable, Random House, New York, 2007). This incorporates a sociocultural perspective on risk, emphasizing the contexts in which risk is understood, lived, embodied and experienced. Their risk calculation is explained in terms of social consent, practical intelligibility and convergence of constraints and motivation. The pragmatic and practical orientation towards risk stands in contrast to how risk is calculated in the avian influenza preparedness paradigm. It is argued that disease risk on the ground has become a normalized part of everyday business, as implied in Black Swan theory. Risk which is calculated retrospectively is unlikely to encourage investment in biosecurity and, thereby, points to the danger of unpredictable outlier events

Citizen engagement in public services in low‐ and middle‐income countries: A mixed‐methods systematic review of participation, inclusion, transparency and accountability (PITA) initiatives

Background: How do governance interventions that engage citizens in public service delivery planning, management and oversight impact the quality of and access to services and citizens’ quality of life? This systematic review examined high quality evidence from 35 citizen engagement programmes in low- and middle-income countries that promote the engagement of citizens in service delivery through four routes: participation (participatory priority setting); inclusion of marginalised groups; transparency (information on rights and public service performance), and/or citizen efforts to ensure public service accountability (citizen feedback and monitoring); collectively, PITA mechanisms. We collected quantitative and qualitative data from the included studies and used statistical meta-analysis and realist-informed framework synthesis to analyse the findings. Results: The findings suggest that interventions promoting citizen engagement by improving direct engagement between service users and service providers, are often effective in stimulating active citizen engagement in service delivery and realising improvements in access to services and quality of service provision, particularly for services that involve direct interaction between citizens and providers. However, in the absence of complementary interventions to address bottlenecks around service provider supply chains and service use, citizen engagement interventions alone may not improve key wellbeing outcomes for target communities or state-society relations. In addition, interventions promoting citizen engagement by increasing citizen pressures on politicians to hold providers to account, are not usually able to influence service delivery. Conclusions: The citizen engagement interventions studied were more likely to be successful: (1) where the programme targeted a service that citizens access directly from front-line staff, such as healthcare, as opposed to services accessed independently of service provider staff, such as roads; (2) where implementers were able to generate active support and buy-in for the intervention from both citizens and front-line public service staff and officials; and (3) where the implementation approach drew on and/or stimulated local capacity for collective action. From a research perspective, the review found few studies that investigated the impact of these interventions on women or other vulnerable groups within communities, and that rigorous impact evaluations often lack adequately transparent reporting, particularly of information on what interventions actually did and how conditions compared to those in comparison communities

Newcastle Disease Virus in Madagascar: Identification of an Original Genotype Possibly Deriving from a Died Out Ancestor of Genotype IV

In Madagascar, Newcastle disease (ND) has become enzootic after the first documented epizootics in 1946, with recurrent annual outbreaks causing mortality up to 40%. Four ND viruses recently isolated in Madagascar were genotypically and pathotypically characterised. By phylogenetic inference based on the F and HN genes, and also full-genome sequence analyses, the NDV Malagasy isolates form a cluster distant enough to constitute a new genotype hereby proposed as genotype XI. This new genotype is presumably deriving from an ancestor close to genotype IV introduced in the island probably more than 50 years ago. Our data show also that all the previously described neutralising epitopes are conserved between Malagasy and vaccine strains. However, the potential implication in vaccination failures of specific amino acid substitutions predominantly found on surface-exposed epitopes of F and HN proteins is discussed

Management of Open Fractures in Low-Income Countries: A Daunting Task

The management of open fractures was a challenge from antiquity to the present day. The objective of this study is to report the difficulties of the management of open fractures of long bones in low-income countries. This was a retrospective cohort study of the files of patients admitted for open fracture of long bones in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery and Traumatology of the Anosiala University Hospital Center for four years. Forty-two open long bone fractures were collected. The average age of the patients was 36.3 years of which 73.8% were subject of working age in the age group of 20 to 60 years and 73.8% of the cases were following the accident of the road. Most of the wounded had arrived at the hospital by bush taxi. The tibia was the most affected bone (71.4%). Gustilo IIIA type open fractures were the most observed (38.1%). Only 26.3% of patients had received surgical debridement before the sixth hour. 76.2% had no care before arriving at the hospital, 14.3% had emergency care at the basic health center and 9.5% were already being treated by the traditional healer. Definitive treatment of the fracture was dominated by the external fixator (38.1%) and orthopedic treatment (26.2%).               In low-income countries, the management of open fractures remains a daunting task. The main factors limiting the management of open fractures were the poverty of the population, the lack of health insurance coverage and the retard in arriving at the hospital. Keywords: open fractures, management, low-income, country&nbsp

Appendix A. Location of study sites and forest categories.

Location of study sites and forest categories

Appendix C. Number of destructively sampled trees per country used to develop generic biomass allometric models.

Number of destructively sampled trees per country used to develop generic biomass allometric models

Appendix B. Wood characteristics of tree species and genuses in the tropical forests of Madagascar.

Wood characteristics of tree species and genuses in the tropical forests of Madagascar

Supplement 1. Raw data used for biomass allometric models and height-diameter models.

<h2>File List</h2><blockquote> <a href="AGB-spiny-dry.txt">AGB-spiny-dry.txt</a> (md5: c2fe8cd5cc3d36bb841c95b6187eda6a)<br> <a href="AGB-moist-wet.txt">AGB-moist-wet.txt</a> (md5: 2ab27f70f2da551d6683cfd7fc7ee6dc)<br> <a href="H-D-spiny-dry.txt">H-D-spiny-dry.txt</a> (md5: 46d21cf0d2799802cfaaf87c7ab6f8eb)<br> <a href="H-D-moist-wet.txt">H-D-moist-wet.txt</a> (md5: 95872aa0f7435f88175f9170405076a1) </blockquote><h2>Description</h2><blockquote> <p>AGB-spiny-dry.txt:</p> <p>The AGB-spiny-dry.txt file is a tab-separated data-set. It contains the raw data for tree aboveground biomass, tree height, tree diameter and tree wood specific gravity for the sampled trees in the spiny dry forest of Madagascar.</p> <p>Column definitions:</p> <ol> <li>Tree: tree number</li> <li>Species: species scientific name (family, genus and species names refer to the Tropicos database (MBG, 2010))</li> <li>dAGB: tree dry aboveground biomass in kilogram (kg)</li> <li>D: tree diameter at 1.30 m height in centimeter (cm)</li> <li>H: total tree height in meter (m)</li> <li>rho: tree wood specific gravity (unitless)</li> </ol> <p>Missing values are represented as “NA”.</p> <p>Checksum values:</p> <blockquote> <p>Column 3 (dry aboveground biomass - dAGB): SUM = 2073.2348083864; 0 missing values (rows with data: 132).<br> Column 4 (tree diameter at 1.30 m - D): SUM = 1044.7567084324; 0 missing values (rows with data: 132).<br> Column 5 (total tree height - H): SUM = 655.12; 0 missing values (rows with data: 132).<br> Column 6 (wood specific gravity - rho): SUM = 73.7203325995; 0 missing values (rows with data: 132).</p> </blockquote> <br> <p>AGB-moist-wet.txt:</p> <p>The AGB-moist-wet.txt file is a tab-separated data-set. It contains the raw data for tree aboveground biomass, tree height, tree diameter and tree wood specific gravity for the sampled trees in the moist-wet forest of Madagascar.</p> <p>Column definitions:</p> <ol> <li>Tree: tree number</li> <li>Species: species scientific name (family, genus and species names refer to the Tropicos database (MBG, 2010))</li> <li>dAGB: tree dry aboveground biomass in kilogram (kg)</li> <li>D: tree diameter at 1.30 m height in centimeter (cm)</li> <li>H: total tree height in meter (m)</li> <li>rho: tree wood specific gravity (unitless)</li> </ol> <p>Missing values are represented as “NA”.</p> <p>Checksum values:</p> <blockquote> <p>Column 3 (dry aboveground biomass - dAGB): SUM = 107579.770384427; 0 missing values (rows with data: 336).<br> Column 4 (tree diameter at 1.30 m - D): SUM = 7077.398089172; 0 missing values (rows with data: 336).<br> Column 5 (total tree height - H): SUM = 4939.1; 0 missing values (rows with data: 336).<br> Column 6 (wood specific gravity - rho): SUM = 198.4641914636; 0 missing values (rows with data: 336).</p> </blockquote> <br> <p>H-D-spiny-dry.txt:</p> <p>The H-D-spiny-dry.txt file is a tab-separated data-set. It contains the raw data for tree height and tree DBH in the spiny dry forest of Madagascar.</p> <p>Column definitions:</p> <ol> <li>Tree: tree number</li> <li>Source: data origin (destructive sampling for biomass allometric models or plot inventory)</li> <li>Vname: vernacular name</li> <li>Species: species scientific name (family, genus and species names refer to the Tropicos database (MBG, 2010))</li> <li>D: tree diameter at 1.30 m height in centimeter (cm)</li> <li>H: total tree height in meter (m)</li> </ol> <p>Missing values are represented as “NA”.</p> <p>Checksum values:</p> <blockquote> <p>Column 5 (tree diameter at 1.30 m - D): SUM = 1044.7567084324; 369 missing values (rows with data: 132).<br> Column 6 (total tree height - H): SUM = 2868.92; 0 missing values (rows with data: 501).</p> </blockquote> <br> <p>H-D-moist-wet.txt:</p> <p>The H-D-moist-wet.txt file is a tab-separated data-set. It contains the raw data for tree height and tree DBH in the moist-wet forest of Madagascar.</p> <p>Column definitions:</p> <ol> <li>Tree: tree number</li> <li>Source: data origin (destructive sampling for biomass allometric models or plot inventory)</li> <li>Vname: vernacular name</li> <li>Species: species scientific name (family, genus and species names refer to the Tropicos database (MBG, 2010))</li> <li>D: tree diameter at 1.30 m height in centimeter (cm)</li> <li>H: total tree height in meter (m)</li> </ol> <p>Missing values are represented as “NA”.</p> <p>Checksum values:</p> <blockquote> <p>Column 5 (tree diameter at 1.30 m - D): SUM = 22544.2377551619; 0 missing values (rows with data: 812).<br> Column 6 (total tree height - H): SUM = 13273.5; 0 missing values (rows with data: 812).</p> </blockquote> </blockquote> <br