Strategies for sustainable agricultural development in the East African highlands:

Low agricultural productivity, land degradation and poverty are severe interrelated problems in the East African highlands. While the proximate causes of such problems are relatively well known, the underlying causes are many and complex, and depend upon many site-specific factors that vary greatly across the diverse circumstances of the region. In this paper, we argue that the appropriate strategy for sustainable development depends greatly upon the “pathways of development” that are feasible in a given location. We argue that such development pathways will be largely determined by three factors determining comparative advantage: agricultural potential, access to markets, and population density. We conclude the paper with hypotheses about the priorities for policy intervention to achieve sustainable development in the East African highlands. Among these, we suggest that the highest priority for road and irrigation development should be areas close to urban markets with high agricultural potential; that development of input and output markets and credit systems will be most critical in such areas; that increasing food security through increased food crop production or other means is likely to be a key to realizing the potential for more commercial production; that subsidies on the costs of transporting fertilizer to remote, high-potential, food deficit areas should be considered as a lower cost alternative to food aid; and that intensified and more private use of hillsides and grazing areas for sustainable uses such as tree planting may have potential to achieve more rapid and sustainable development of lower potential areas.Land degradation, Sustainable agriculture, Population density,

Children with complex support needs in healthcare settings for prolonged periods: their numbers, characteristics and experiences

This report details the findings of research conducted in England and Scotland to identify how many children with complex support needs are spending longer than one month in healthcare settings in Scotland and England, how and why they are in hospital, why they have not been discharged home or to appropriate alternative community-based facilities, and how well the hospital or healthcare setting is meeting their emotional, social and educational needs. It finds that many of these children could and should be discharged but are not, for a variety of reasons: primarily the lack of appropriate resources in the community and poor discharge planning processes, coupled with the inability of their families to manage their care and supervision without intensive support. Hospitals and healthcare settings in many cases are not meeting their needs and these children are being denied the protection offered by UK legislation governing children's rights and welfare

Detection and quantification of reactive atmospheric nitrogen species in remote ecosystems

Anthropogenic inputs of nitrogen to the environment have increased by over 150 % in the last 150 years causing concern for vital biophysical processes on Earth. Thus being able to measure these increased inputs in terrestrial, aquatic and atmospheric environments is essential to understanding how the global nitrogen cycle has been impacted since the industrial revolution. With respect to the atmosphere, emissions of reduced and oxidized forms of nitrogen have increased largely due to the anthropogenic activities of agriculture and combustion, respectively. Emissions of these nitrogenous species not only impact regions adjacent to their point sources, but also have the ability to influence ecosystems hundreds of kilometers away due to the long-range transport of some of these compounds. This can impact sensitive remote ecosystems positively or negatively by either stimulating growth or causing acidification, eutrophication and biodiversity shifts. Therefore developing analytical techniques that are capable of measuring oxidized and reduced atmospheric inputs to remote ecosystems is of great importance. In part I of this work a method employing custom-built physisorption-based passive samplers coupled with ion chromatography analysis was developed to sample atmospheric nitric acid (HNO₃(g)) in remote ecosystems. The developed HNO₃(g) sampling method was able to detect HNO₃(g) mixing ratios as low as 2 parts per trillion by volume (pptv) over a monthly sampling period, following a rigorous quality assurance and quality control procedure. The passive samplers were installed across the Newfoundland and Labrador – Boreal Ecosystem Latitudinal Transect (NL-BELT) in the summer of 2015, and average mixing ratios of HNO₃(g) at the NL-BELT field sites from 2015-16 were determined to be in the tens of parts per trillion by volume (pptv) range. The dry deposition flux of HNO₃(g) as nitrogen (N) to the field sites ranged from 3 – 16 mg N yr-1. Through an air mass back trajectory analysis, coupled with a steady-state chemical box model approximation, it was determined that the HNO₃(g) quantities observed at a single NL-BELT site likely originated from local production and regional transport from central and eastern Newfoundland, with an additional contribution from the down welling of peroxyacetyl nitrates from the upper troposphere, possibly occurring during the spring and early summer. In part II of this work, an ion chromatography method was developed to speciate and quantify alkylamines (NR₃(g)). NR₃(g) have been shown to influence Earth’s climate and may be an important source of new nitrogen to remote ecosystems. The developed method was shown to be sensitive, accurate, and robust in separating and quantifying 11 atmospheric alkylamines, including 3 sets of alkylamine isomers, from 5 common atmospheric inorganic cations. The method was able to detect NR₃(g) at a picogram per injection level, and the method performed robustly in the presence of a complex biomassburning matrix containing amounts of inorganic cations up to 3 orders of magnitude larger than the NR₃(g) quantified in the samples. Thus the ion chromatography method can be applied to the remote atmosphere where alkylamine concentrations are often detected in quantities 1000 times less than other atmospheric cations. In the biomass-burning particle samples tested using the ion chromatography method unprecedented quantities of dimethylamine and diethylamine were observed, with the summed molar quantity exceeding that of ammonium in the 100 – 560 nm particle diameter fraction. The applicability of these atmospheric measurement techniques to measure and quantify HNO₃(g) and NR₃(g) has been demonstrated for remote ecosystems and will hopefully allow for a greater understanding of these two species roles’ in remote environments

Evidence-Based Veterinary Medicine Learning: an open access tutorial for practitioners and students

EBVM Learning, an open access online tutorial, has been developed to support the teaching of evidence-based veterinary medicine (EBVM).  This paper provides the project background and teaching examples.  The authors request JEAHIL readers share this resource with colleagues who support evidence-based practices including veterinary medicine

Assessing research impact on poverty: the importance of farmers’ perspectives

P. Kristjanson and P.K. Thornton are ILRI authorsIn this paper we provide evidence to show that farmers' perspectives on poverty processes and outcomes are critical in the early stages of evaluating impact of agricultural research on poverty. We summarize lessons learned from farmer impact assessment workshops held in five African locations, covering three agro-ecological zones and five different agroforestry and livestock technologies arising from collaborative national–international agricultural research. Poverty alleviation is a process that needs to be understood before impact can be measured. Workshops such as those we describe can help researchers to identify farmers' different ways of managing and using a technology and likely effects, unanticipated impacts, major impacts to pursue in more quantitative studies, the primary links between agricultural technology and poverty, and key conditioning factors affecting adoption and impact that can be used to stratify samples in more formal analyses. Farmer workshops inform other qualitative and quantitative impact assessment methods. We discuss the linkage of farmer-derived information with GIS-based approaches that allow more complete specification of recommendation domains and broader-scale measurement of impact

Exploring opportunities around climate-smart breeding for future food and nutrition security

There is a 95% chance that warming will exceed 2°C by the end of the century (Raftery et al. 2017). Global crop productivity is projected to fall by 5-10 % per degree of warming (Challinor et al. 2014), with even greater losses likely for some crops in some areas. The challenge of meeting future food demand is increasing, and climate change is already diminishing our ability to adapt through crop breeding (Challinor et al. 2016; Aggarwal et al. 2019). Recent research is suggesting that increases in climate variability are already affecting the number of food-insecure people, and that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations may affect the nutrient content of some food staples, with serious implications for food and nutrition security (Smith and Myers 2018). New crop varieties will be needed that can deliver higher yields as well as possessing the ability to withstand heat and greater tolerances for the secondary effects of a warmer world, such as increased pressures from drought, water-logging, pests and diseases, and reduced nutritional quality due to higher levels of CO2. The systems for accelerated delivery of climate-resilient varieties into food producers’ hands need to be massively upgraded (Cramer 2018). Innovative holistic breeding strategies for multiple traits will be needed that embrace the full pipeline from trait discovery to varietal deployment and seed system development

Increasing the biosafety of analytical systems in the clinical laboratory

Biosafety is an important part of the know-how of all clinical laboratory professionals. Biosafely must have high priority in the design and use of analytical systems. Attention should be focused on reducing the handling of biological specimens, reducing biohazards to laboratory personnel, and on improving the labelling and containment of biohazardous materials. In this paper, biosafety issues are discussed in relation to the design of analytical systems, their use and maintenance