Surveillance in contemporary livestock production systems

The objectives of this research were to explore the use of swine oral fluids, a type of aggregate sample, in infectious disease surveillance. In Chapter 2, the uses and surveillance applications of aggregate samples are reviewed. As reported in the refereed literature, bulk tank milk samples from ovine, bovine, and caprine herds have been tested to determine disease status and herd immunity. Likewise, swine producers and veterinarians have used oral fluid testing for disease detection and the evaluation of herd immunity. In Chapter 3, sampling guidelines for oral fluid surveillance in commercial swine herds are presented. These guidelines are the result of field-based research in which oral fluids were collected weekly from 3 barns on one wean-to-finish farm for 9 weeks and tested for porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) RNA. Results were modeled using a piecewise exponential survival model to provide estimates of the probability of detection by disease prevalence, sample size, and diagnostic assay performance. Notably, this study showed that fixed spatial sampling was as good, if not better, than simple random sampling and that probability of detection on a swine farm improved significantly when multiple barns on the farm were sampled. In Chapter 4, a combined IgM-IgA PRRSV oral fluid ELISA was evaluated for its ability to detect pig-derived antibody produced in response to infection in the presence of maternal antibody. Two studies were performed. In Study 1 (experimental conditions), oral fluid samples were collected daily from 12 PRRSV-negative pigs from days post vaccination (DPV) -7 to DPV 42. Pigs were vaccinated using a modified-live PRRS vaccine on DPV 0. In Study 2 (field conditions), oral fluids were collected weekly from 3 wean-to-finish sites, each with 3 barns, for a total of 9 samplings. Testing of oral fluids from both studies by IgG, IgM, IgA, and IgM-IgA ELISAs showed that the IgM-IgA ELISA was able to detect pig-derived IgM and IgA in the face of circulating maternal antibody and that the combined IgM-IgA assay provided better performance than detection of either IgM or IgA alone

Investigation of the Exraction Processes and Performance Properties of Kudzu Fibers

While kudzu was introduced into the Southeastern United states for soil erosion and increase of land fertility, the plant has become unmanageable and is rapidly spreading to Canada. Japanese traditional craftsmen extract long, white fibers by labor intensive practices not feasible for 21st century commercial fiber production. This research investigated extraction by boiling, retting or fermentation, enzymatic combinations, and mild chemical processes. Two types of fibers were resultant- soft fibers and compact woody fibers. These fibers types were assessed for microscopic visual appearance, elemental analysis using EDAX SEM, and tensile strengths for the four extraction processes. In all extraction cases, the resultant amount of woody kudzu fibers was 2-5 times that of soft fibers. Breaking elongation of both soft and woody fibers was very high as compared to that of cotton fibers. Chemical processes improved the strength of soft fibers to a very high degree, averaging 19.89kg/tex

‘I arranged my own marriage': arranged marriages and post-colonial feminism

This article looks at the practice of arranged marriage among women of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin resident in Britain. It examines the conflation of arranged marriages with forced marriages and the assumption that arranged marriages are examples of cultural practices that thwart individual agency. Drawing upon original empirical data, this article will argue that in the practice of arranged marriage, some South Asian women are able to exercise agency while choosing their marriage partner. They adapt traditional arranged marriage practices to navigate their way around strict cultural expectations and to negotiate with their family members the choice of a match that is favourable for them. It provides a corrective account of arranged marriages by challenging the stereotype of the ‘oppressed third world women' and their experiences of such marriages. The article will do this by employing the idea of post-colonial feminism and by highlighting two long-standing issues in feminist debates: the idea of agency and the conception and role of power in the struggle for women's rights. It will make a case for a post-colonial approach to feminism as one way of reconciling feminism with the politics of multiculturalism

R.K. Narayan: Straddling Metropole and Malgudi

“In her essay ‘Resistance through Sub/Mission in the Novels of R. K. Narayan,’ Hyacinth Cynthia Wyatt argues that ‘among Indian authors writing in English, R. K. Narayan was among the first to resist Western cultural dominance’…

'This was a Conradian world I was entering': Postcolonial river-journeys beyond the Black Atlantic in Caryl Phillips's work

Caryl Phillips has been accused of replicating the stereotyped view of a timeless, ahistorical Africa that Paul Gilroy puts forward in his paradigm of the Black Atlantic. Yet this article shows that Crossing the River and Phillips’s essays about Africa suggest ways in which Gilroy’s important paradigm of the black Atlantic could be broadened to become more inclusive of writing about Africa. Phillips draws inspiration from writers such as V S Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, and especially Joseph Conrad, to update the literary journey upriver and make it relevant to contemporary West African issues. A complex interplay of racial identities occurs when people from the African diaspora travel to Africa; this is a key preoccupation for Phillips when he rewrites Conrad. During the course of his river-journeys, Phillips meditates upon the complexities of being a black Westerner in Africa, examines the memory of slavery, colonialism and postcolonial unrest, problematises diasporan attempts to ‘return’ to Africa, and recognises the longstanding modernity of African countries

Post-millennial Literature

This chapter investigates the British novel since 2000 by thinking about how a range of novels demonstrate a concern with the ability of contemporary prose fiction to maintain the 'meanwhile' which, according to Benedict Anderson, has been crucial to the novel's representational techniques since its inception

Hosts and hostages: Mass immigration and the power of hospitality in post-war British and Caribbean literature

This article examines the challenge to colonialist centre-periphery relations in post-war novels by white British and Caribbean writers. Concentrating on the relationship between political debates surrounding mass immigration and the marginalization of non-white migrants within British communities, I analyse texts that depict the threshold of the home as the politicized site of racial tension, namely Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967), Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and Anthony Burgess’s The Right to an Answer (1960). In varying ways, these texts depict the durability of centre-periphery relations at local levels through the informal segregation of the colonizer and the colonized. In doing so they point to what Jacques Derrida has outlined, in Of Hospitality (2000), as the power relationship inherent in policies of immigration, whereby the host-nation remains in control of the conditions upon which hospitality rests