Livestock trade networks for guiding animal health surveillance

BACKGROUND: Trade in live animals can contribute to the introduction of exotic diseases, the maintenance and spread endemic diseases. Annually millions of animals are moved across Europe for the purposes of breeding, fattening and slaughter. Data on the number of animals moved were obtained from the Directorate General Sanco (DG Sanco) for 2011. These were converted to livestock units to enable direct comparison across species and their movements were mapped, used to calculate the indegrees and outdegrees of 27 European countries and the density and transitivity of movements within Europe. This provided the opportunity to discuss surveillance of European livestock movement taking into account stopping points en-route. RESULTS: High density and transitivity of movement for registered equines, breeding and fattening cattle, breeding poultry and pigs for breeding, fattening and slaughter indicates that hazards have the potential to spread quickly within these populations. This is of concern to highly connected countries particularly those where imported animals constitute a large proportion of their national livestock populations, and have a high indegree. The transport of poultry (older than 72 hours) and unweaned animals would require more rest breaks than the movement of weaned animals, which may provide more opportunities for disease transmission. Transitivity is greatest for animals transported for breeding purposes with cattle, pigs and poultry having values of over 50%. CONCLUSIONS: This paper demonstrated that some species (pigs and poultry) are traded much more frequently and at a larger scale than species such as goats. Some countries are more vulnerable than others due to importing animals from many countries, having imported animals requiring rest-breaks and importing large proportions of their national herd or flock. Such knowledge about the vulnerability of different livestock systems related to trade movements can be used to inform the design of animal health surveillance systems to facilitate the trade in animals between European member states. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12917-015-0354-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Exploring local knowledge and perceptions on zoonoses among pastoralists in northern and eastern Tanzania

Background: Zoonoses account for the most commonly reported emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, there is limited knowledge on how pastoral communities perceive zoonoses in relation to their livelihoods, culture and their wider ecology. This study was carried out to explore local knowledge and perceptions on zoonoses among pastoralists in Tanzania. Methodology and principal findings: This study involved pastoralists in Ngorongoro district in northern Tanzania and Kibaha and Bagamoyo districts in eastern Tanzania. Qualitative methods of focus group discussions, participatory epidemiology and interviews were used. A total of 223 people were involved in the study. Among the pastoralists, there was no specific term in their local language that describes zoonosis. Pastoralists from northern Tanzania possessed a higher understanding on the existence of a number of zoonoses than their eastern districts' counterparts. Understanding of zoonoses could be categorized into two broad groups: a local syndromic framework, whereby specific symptoms of a particular illness in humans concurred with symptoms in animals, and the biomedical framework, where a case definition is supported by diagnostic tests. Some pastoralists understand the possibility of some infections that could cross over to humans from animals but harm from these are generally tolerated and are not considered as threats. A number of social and cultural practices aimed at maintaining specific cultural functions including social cohesion and rites of passage involve animal products, which present zoonotic risk. Conclusions: These findings show how zoonoses are locally understood, and how epidemiology and biomedicine are shaping pastoralists perceptions to zoonoses. Evidence is needed to understand better the true burden and impact of zoonoses in these communities. More studies are needed that seek to clarify the common understanding of zoonoses that could be used to guide effective and locally relevant interventions. Such studies should consider in their approaches the pastoralists' wider social, cultural and economic set up

Investigating market-based opportunities for the provision of nutritious and safe diets to prevent childhood stunting: a UKRI-GCRF action against stunting hub protocol paper

Background Inadequate access to affordable, safe, desirable and convenient nutrient-dense food is one of the underlying causes of child stunting. While targeted nutrition-sensitive interventions (e.g., backyard ‘nutri-gardens’) may increase dietary diversity within farming households, such interventions have limited scalability across the wider food system where markets remain underdeveloped. This research aims to develop and assess market-based interventions for key nutrient-dense foods to help improve the diets of women and children in the first 1000 days of life. Methods Data collection uses four parallel approaches in each of the three study countries (India, Indonesia and Senegal). (1) A novel food environment tool will be developed to characterise the accessibility and affordability of nutrient-dense foods in the study countries. The tool will be validated through pretesting using cognitive interviewing and piloting in purposively sampled households, 10 (cognitive interviewing) and 30 (piloting) households in each country; (2) stakeholder interviews (e.g., with producers, intermediaries and retailers) will be conducted to map out nutrition-sensitive entry points of key value chains (e.g., animal-sourced foods), before hotspots of potential food safety hazards will be identified from food samples collected along the chains; (3) the Optifood and Agrifood tools will be used to identify foods that can address food system nutrient gaps and engage key stakeholders to prioritise market interventions to improve nutrition outcomes. Optifood and Agrifood parameters will be informed by publicly available data, plus interviews and focus groups with value chain stakeholders; (4) informed by the previous three approaches and a campaign of participatory ‘group model building’, a novel system dynamics model will evaluate the impact of alternative market-based solutions on the availability and affordability of nutrient-dense foods over time. Ethics and dissemination The study has received ethical approval in the United Kingdom, Senegal, Indonesia and India. Dissemination comprises peer-reviewed journals, international disciplinary conferences and multistakeholder dissemination workshops

RUDI, a short interspersed element of the V-SINE superfamily widespread in molluscan genomes

Short interspersed elements (SINEs) are non-autonomous retrotransposons that are widespread in eukaryotic genomes. They exhibit a chimeric sequence structure consisting of a small RNA-related head, an anonymous body and an AT-rich tail. Although their turnover and de novo emergence is rapid, some SINE elements found in distantly related species retain similarity in certain core segments (or highly conserved domains, HCD). We have characterized a new SINE element named RUDI in the bivalve molluscs Ruditapes decussatus and R. philippinarum and found this element to be widely distributed in the genomes of a number of mollusc species. An unexpected structural feature of RUDI is the HCD domain type V, which was first found in non-amniote vertebrate SINEs and in the SINE from one cnidarian species. In addition to the V domain, the overall sequence conservation pattern of RUDI elements resembles that found in ancient AmnSINE (~310 Myr old) and Au SINE (~320 Myr old) families, suggesting that RUDI might be among the most ancient SINE families. Sequence conservation suggests a monophyletic origin of RUDI. Nucleotide variability and phylogenetic analyses suggest long-term vertical inheritance combined with at least one horizontal transfer event as the most parsimonious explanation for the observed taxonomic distribution