Using a One Health approach to assess the impact of parasitic disease in livestock: how does it add value?

Human population increases, with greater food demands, have resulted in a rapid evolution of livestock food systems, leading to changes in land and water use. The scale of global livestock systems mean that changes in animal health status, particularly in parasite levels, have impacts that go beyond farm and sector levels. To quantify the true impact of parasites in livestock, frameworks that look at both resources and services valued in markets and those that have no true market value are required. Mitigating the effects of parasitic disease in livestock will not only increase productivity, but also improve animal welfare and human health, whilst reducing the environmental burden of livestock production systems. To measure these potential benefits, a One Health approach is needed. This paper discusses the types of methods and the data collection tools needed for a more holistic perspective and provides a framework with its application to coccidiosis in poultry. To build a body of knowledge that allows the ranking of parasite diseases in a wider animal health setting, such One Health frameworks need to be applied more frequently and with rigour. The outcome will improve the allocation of resources to critical constraints on parasite management

Poor Relief in Sixteenth Century England

The amount of charitable provision administered by the monasteries of the later Middle Ages has long received the attention of historians exploring pre-industrial social-welfare systems. Most nineteenth-century commentators remained skeptical about the value of monastic poor relief: The charity distributed by the monks . . . was to a great extent unorganized and indiscriminate and did nearly as much to increase beggars as to relieve them. No systematic study of monastic charity was carried out, however, until Savine’s analysis in 1909. Using the national Church tax assessment of 1535, known as the Valor Ecclesiasticus (hereinafter Valor), Savine calculated that the average proportion of monastic national gross income spent on poor relief was c. 2.5 percent -- a figure that remained influential on historiography until as recently as 1998. Among those who revised this interpretation, Harvey outlined the provision of the sixteenth-century Westminster Abbey where the monks distributed the large sum of £400 per annum -- about 10 percent of the Abbey’s gross income -- in various forms of relief to the poorer inhabitants of Westminster and London.

Mentoring in the Lifelong Learning Sector: a critical heuristic account

This paper explores a heuristic (‘allowing people to learn for themselves’ [Allen, 2004: p. 654]) mentoring case involving an Advanced Practitioner (AP) tasked with the role of mentoring a trainee PGCE teacher who had received a grade 4 (unsatisfactory) decision of his teaching by the college quality assurance system. The paper outlines the relevant theories and frameworks of mentoring which were considered at the time, those which seemed to emerge quite naturally, albeit in skeletal form, and the way in which reflective practice was found to be the key to unlocking the mentor/mentee relationship in profound and critical ways

Sustainable Funding for the Arts: What Can Atlanta Learn from the Detroit Experience?

In 2003 Atlantans began a conversation about sustainable funding for the arts, and whether there should be some kind of earmarked tax revenues for the arts in the Metro area. A Research Atlanta study looked at some of the options, the experience of other US cities, and the tough questions advocates of sustainable funding would need to address to secure broad public support for such a measure.The 2003 study noted that in November 2002, voters in Metropolitan Detroit rejected, in a close vote, a proposed increase in property taxes that would have been directed to the arts and other cultural institutions. In this paper we ask what Atlanta can learn from the Detroit vote. In particular, we will use the precinct-level results of the Detroit referendum, matched with Census Tract data, to get some of idea of which voters supported the arts funding and which did not. To our knowledge this is the first detailed empirical examination of voting for arts funding in the US. We will then consider how Atlanta is like, and unlike, Detroit, and what conclusions we might draw from the Detroit experience

Government Contracting with Faith-Based Providers: An Economic Perspective

This article analyses the policy debate surrounding the possible expansion of government contracting with faith-based providers of social services, from the perspective of recent developments in the economics of contracts. It presents a non-technical introduction to the economic tools used in the study of contracts, in particular the decision faced by governments of whether to provide services in-house or to contract out to a private nonprofit organization. In particular the paper looks at the problems of monitoring the quality of service provision and ensuring fairness in the procurement process. When the analysis is applied to the question of faith-based provision, the conclusion is that monitoring the terms of the contract is less of an issue than the debates that will arise over the distribution of contracts across different faith-based organizations. Working Paper 06-2