Devastating African disease of pigs gets new attention and funding

African Swine Fever Workshop, July 2011, Nairobi; from left: Raymond Rowland (Kansas State University), David Odongo (ILRI), Richard Bishop (ILRI), Maria-Jesus Munoz (CISA-INIA) and Jose-Manuel Vizcaino (Head of OIE ASF World Reference Centre Madrid) on a visit to the new BecA-ILRI laboratories (photo credit: ILRI/Edward Okoth).

New Agriculturist reported late last year on renewed research effort to tackle African swine fever, a devastating disease of pigs.

‘Causing up to 100 per cent mortality in previously unaffected animals, African Swine Fever (ASF) is a devastating disease of pigs. Endemic across much of Africa, the disease poses a wider threat to global food security, particularly in East Asia, where at least 50 per cent of the protein consumed is pork, much of it produced through small to medium-scale “backyard” enterprises.

‘Current control methods are by diagnosis and slaughter but this approach is difficult, expensive and often not practical for smallholder farmers. To better understand the complexities of the disease, a consortium of research and development organisations from around the world is implementing a range of approaches across Africa.

Whilst there are currently no formal economic estimates of the overall losses to ASF in Africa, an outbreak in Madagascar in 1998 killed half the country’s pig population (250,000 animals). During the last year, ASF outbreaks have also been reported in North Cameroon where over 100,000 animals may have been lost to the disease. In October 2010, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) received notification of the first ASF outbreak in Chad. . . .

‘A new injection of research funding will enable African scientists to obtain in-depth data to provide improved insight into the transmission and spread of ASF between African countries. AusAID is supporting Australia’s national science agency (CSIRO), in developing an institutional partnership with the Biosciences eastern and central Africa (BecA) hub.

‘The research team is working to better understand modes of viral transmission, between different geographical regions. . . .

“Collaboration and awareness of biosecurity measures between agencies and across borders is essential since ASF is a transboundary disease,” explains Dr Richard Bishop, project leader. “Through BecA and other mechanisms, we now have national veterinary laboratories increasingly working together across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi, to formulate joint control policies, an initiative that is critical to secure East Africa’s smallerholder pig industry,” he adds. . . .’

This work is funded by development partners including the Africa Union-Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR), the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), Centro de Investigación en Sanidad Animal-Instituto Nacional de Investigación y Tecnología Agraria y Alimentaria (CISA-INIA Spain), the Food and Agriculture Organization-Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases (FAO-ECTAD) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE).

The BecA hub is hosted and managed by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), where the leader of this African swine fever project, Richard Bishop, is a senior scientist.

Read the whole article at New Agriculturist: Renewed research effort to tackle African swine fever, Nov 2011.

 

Strengthening laboratory capacity in response to emerging pandemic threats: FAO, OIE and WHO working together

Early detection of zoonotic pathogens emerging in wild and domestic animal populations before they become a threat to human health is a priority for the public health and animal health sectors. An effective and credible laboratory service is an essential component of such early detection systems.

As part of the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) Program, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the World Health Organization (WHO) are collaborating on a project known as ‘IDENTIFY’ that strengthens national laboratory capacity for rapid and accurate detection of targeted diseases in the Congo Basin in central Africa and in countries in South and South-East Asia.

Download a leaflet on laboratory capacity building (PDF)

More on the IDENTIFY project

 

Standard-setting organizations for safe livestock trade need to evolve and collaborate more closely to meet new challenges

A new paper by by GK Bruckner, of South Africa, Ensuring safe international trade: how are the roles and responsibilities evolving and what will the situation be in ten years’ time?, outlines the changing and evolving roles and responsibilities in ensuring safe international trade in animals and animal products.

Bruckner’s abstract follows.

‘The roles of the international standard-setting bodies that are mandated to facilitate safe trade, such as the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), the Codex Alimentarius Commission, the International Plant Protection Convention and the World Trade Organization, are well documented, as are the roles of the international organisations responsible for global health issues: the OIE, the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

‘However, developments in international trade, such as accelerating globalisation and the frequent emergence and re-emergence of diseases affecting both humans and animals, have brought new challenges and the need to reconsider the future roles of such organisations. New participants and new demands have also emerged to challenge these mandates, leading to potential areas of conflict. The need for countries to establish themselves as new trade partners, or to strengthen their positions while still maintaining safe trade, poses a challenge to standard-setting organisations, which must meet these demands while still remaining sensitive to the needs of developing countries. In this paper, the author describes and discusses some of these challenges and suggests how international organisations could evolve to confront such issues.’

Among the conclusions of the paper are the following.

‘While the responsibilities of the main international organisations, such as the OIE, Codex, IPPC and WTO in facilitating safe trade, and the OIE, WHO and FAO in promoting global disease control, are reasonably well defined, changes in the international scene have brought new challenges and a need to reconsider the future evolution of the missions of these organisations. In the past, it was probably easier for these organisations to function in parallel with each other, while maintaining clearly demarcated mandates. Issues such as those emerging in the interface between humans, animals and ecosystems, trade globalisation and the rapid and unprecedented global spread of diseases have all contributed to softening the borders between these organisations.

‘Recent disease outbreaks, such as the H5N1 pandemic, have highlighted the many areas of mutual concern that require the attention of more than one international organisation. The number of private organisations becoming involved in safe trade issues has also increased. Linked to this is the reality that more than two-thirds of the Members of these international organisations are developing countries that do not have the ability either to negotiate or compete with the established participants in international trade. These countries will, for the foreseeable future, remain dependent on international organisations to assist them in achieving their trade needs.

‘In recognising the fast-changing international trade environment, and the challenge that this poses to international organisations, it is equally important that the international organisations should continue to strengthen their mutual roles to act as the arbiters between purely trade-centred needs and the requirement to ensure safe trade in animals and animal products.’

Read the whole paper at Rev. sci. tech. Off. int. Epiz. by GK Bruckner: Ensuring safe international trade: how are the roles and responsibilities evoling and what will the situation be in ten years’ time? 2011, 30 (1), 317-324.

 

It’s official! FAO declares rinderpest vanquished

Cow bell from Kenya, on loan from Gary K Clarke, Cowabunga Safaris (photo by Topeka & Shawness County Public Library on Flickr).

This week, as the New York Times reports below, the United Nations officially declared that, for only the second time in history, a disease has been wiped off the face of the earth. The disease is rinderpest.

‘The name means “cattle plague” in German, and it is a relative of the measles virus that infects cloven-hoofed beasts, including cattle, buffaloes, large antelopes and deer, pigs and warthogs, even giraffes and wildebeests. The most virulent strains killed 95 percent of the herds they attacked.

‘But rinderpest is hardly irrelevant to humans. It has been blamed for speeding the fall of the Roman Empire, aiding the conquests of Genghis Khan and hindering those of Charlemagne, opening the way for the French and Russian Revolutions, and subjugating East Africa to colonization.

‘Any society dependent on cattle—or relatives like African zebu, Asian water buffaloes or Himalayan yaks—was vulnerable.

‘As meat and milk, cattle were and are both food and income to peasant farmers, as well as the source of calves to sell and manure for fields. Until recently, they were the tractors that dragged plows and the trucks that hauled crops to market. When herds die, their owners starve.

‘The long but little-known campaign to conquer rinderpest is a tribute to the skill and bravery of “big animal” veterinarians, who fought the disease in remote and sometimes war-torn areas—across arid stretches of Africa bigger than Europe, in the Arabian desert and on the Mongolian steppes. . . .

The eradication of rinderpest shows what can be done when field commanders combine scientific advances and new tactics. . . .

‘Africa was spared until 1887, when the Italian Army, struggling to conquer Abyssinia, imported Indian cattle for food and draft power.

‘From the port of Massawa in present-day Eritrea, the virus exploded so fast that it reached South Africa within a decade (and is considered one of the factors that impoverished Boer farmers as war with the English approached). It doomed East Africa’s wandering herders, subsisting on milk mixed with cow blood. Historians believe a third of them or more starved to death. . . .

‘In 1761, the first school of veterinary medicine was founded in Lyon, France, specifically to fight rinderpest.

‘In 1924, a new and devastating European outbreak was the impetus for creating the World Organization for Animal Health, the veterinary equivalent of the World Health Organization. . . .

‘The intractable problem was Africa. The disease was in 32 countries there, and many had pastoralist tribes like the Fulani, Masai, Dinka and Afar, who lived on the borderless fringes and drove cattle up to 50 miles a day, having virtually no contact with governments and getting no veterinary bulletins. . . .

‘Just reaching them was hard. Land Rovers broke down, gasoline and cash ran short. Vaccine was packaged with salt so it could be dissolved in saline, but in remote areas salt was so valuable that it would be stolen. . . .

‘A crucial advance was a new vaccine that survived a month without refrigeration. That let herders who could be recruited do their own vaccinating. An education campaign using comic books, flip charts and lecturers who spoke local languages was begun. . . .

‘Even though the last known case was in 2001, officials waited 10 years to declare success, since surveillance is harder with animal diseases. Even in Somalia, where the last smallpox case was found, a dying child would be rushed to a hospital. A dying cow would just be left behind.

‘The whole campaign, from 1945 to the present, cost about $5 billion, the United Nations has estimated.

‘“At first I thought, that’s quite a lot,” Dr. Roeder said. “Then I thought, that last royal wedding cost $8 billion. This was cheap.”’

* * *

Read the whole article at the New York Times: Rinderpest, scourge of cattle, is vanquished, 27 June 2011.

Read about the role of ILRI scientist Jeffrey Mariner in developing the improved vaccine, which did not require refrigeration:
ILRI News Blog: Deadly rinderpest virus today declared eradicated from the earth–’greatest achievement in veterinary medicine, 28 June 2011.

ILRI Clippings Blog: Beating plague: Rinderpest is the second disease to be eradicated from the earth, 23 May 2011.

The Ethiopian government, along with a team from FIC and the Tufts School of Medicine, in July 2011 celebrated the official eradication of the rinderpest virus from the country, once a hotspot for the disease. Jeffrey Mariner, than a research associate at Tufts, was integral in finding the vaccine, which he began working on nearly two decades ago.Watch the film, Beating Plague, on Earth Reporters, a section of the website of The Open University.

 

Beating plague: Rinderpest is the second disease to be eradicated from the earth

ILRI veterinary epidemiologist Jeff Mariner presenting his research at a meeting of the World Animal Health Organisation (OIE) (photo credit: OIE).

A disease that has devastated the planet for millennia has been eradicated. An international campaign has wiped the cattle plague rinderpest off the face of the earth.

‘For centuries, a disease has ravaged the globe—visiting nearly all corners at one time or another. In Europe so great was the threat of this disease that in the early 18th century, the Pope commissioned one of his most trusted physicians to investigate. Giovanni Lancisi’s “De Bovilla Peste”, is his detailed study of the disease, and represents the first concerted effort to control it.

‘Historians believe that in 4th-century-Europe the cattle disease, rinderpest may have contributed to the downfall of the Roman Empire.

‘Since then Rinderpest has killed hundreds of millions of cattle worldwide. Untreated, it kills within days, wiping out whole herds and causing devastating economic losses wherever it has taken hold.’

The quotes above are from ‘Beating Plague,’ a 25-minute documentary film produced by Headlight Pictures for tve in partnership with The Open University. In the film, Dickens Chibeu, a veterinary epidemiologist from Kenya, tells the story of how one of the world’s most destructive diseases has been stamped out—after centuries of trying. The success was due in part to a breakthrough vaccination—and in part thanks to global collaboration. There are lessons here for animal and human health—and for other kinds of international cooperation.

Peter Roeder, former secretary of the rinderpest Eradication Campaign, says in this film that this is only the second time in the history of the world that a disease has been eradicated, with smallpox being the first.

One of the last pockets of the virus was in East Africa, where Dickens Chibeu works at the Inter-African Bureau for Animal Resources. Chibeu says that livestock contribute some 30 per cent of agricultural gross domestic product in this region of Africa.

The eradication of rinderpest represents a significant achievement of African science. It was at the Veterinary Research Institute at Muguga, just outside Nairobi, Kenya, that Walter Plowright developed the vaccine against rinderpest.

Jeff Mariner, an animal virus expert working for the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), headquartered in Nairobi, is interviewed in the film. Mariner led development of a thermostable version of the vaccine and helped train pastoralist livestock herders to deliver it. He says that the last remaining reservoirs of the disease in Africa were in the vast pastoral rangelands of Somalia, Sudan, northern Kenya and Uganda. A vaccine was needed that did not need to be kept cold as it was transported and delivered to these remote areas.

Mariner says it took a team effort to bring together modern and traditional knowledge about this disease. Sustained political support and productive partnerships were also critical.

Watch the film, Beating Plague, on Earth Reporters, a section of the website of The Open University.

 

Reality checks for advocates of jatropha and food safety standards for the poor

Estevao Carlos, a pork seller in Morrumbala District, in Zambezia, the most populated province of Mozambique (photo credit: ILRI/Mann).

Two useful reality checks have appeared this week for those of us in the agricultural research for development business.

(1) The first concerns the hardy jatropha tree, widely heralded as a miracle biofuel source.
Miyuki Iiyama, fellow at the World Agroforestry Centre, and James Onchieku, principal research officer at the Kenya Forestry Research Institute, write in SciDev.Net this week (27 October 2010) that ‘while it is possible that jatropha could eventually evolve into a higher yielding oil crop that is productive on marginal lands, and markets could be established for its oil and other useful by-products, it is far too soon to make such promises.

‘The reality is that jatropha is still essentially a semi-wild plant and as such its seed yields, oil quality and oil content are all highly variable. Considerable research is needed into the agronomy of jatropha and crop improvement.

‘The FAO/IFAD [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations/International Fund for Agricultural Development] report recommends short-term research focused on producing superior clonal plants, with longer-term work on developing improved varieties with reliable trait expression and a seed production system that ensures farmer have access to productive and reliable planting materials.

‘For now, the main potential of jatropha is as part of a strategy to reclaim degraded land, provide a source of locally processed and used oil, and as a hedgerow to control grazing. Until further R&D is conducted — by establishing jatropha trials in various agro-ecological zones, with farmers informed of best practices — significant plantations remain risky and uneconomical. Only “business as usual” should continue.’

Read the whole article at SciDevNet: Reality check for ‘miracle’ biofuel crop, 29 October 2010.

(2) The second reality check concerns what farming practices poor livestock producers should, and can, follow to ensure food safety.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) teamed up to produce a new book called Guide to Good Farming Practices for Animal Production and Food Safety (2010).

Here’s the introduction:
‘Food safety is universally recognised as a public health priority. It requires a holistic approach, from production to consumption.

‘This Guide is intended to help Competent Authorities to assist stakeholders, including farmers, to fully assume their responsibilities at the animal production stage of the food chain to produce safe food. Good farming practices should also address socioeconomic, animal health and environmental issues in a coherent manner.

‘The recommendations in the Guide complement the responsibilities of the Competent Authorities at the farm level, in particular those of the Veterinary Services, and are intended to assist in developing on-farm quality assurance systems for animal product food safety. This document complements existing OIE, FAO and Codex Alimentarius Commission (Codex) texts aimed at addressing animal health and welfare, socioeconomic and environmental issues related to farming practices. The bibliography lists the most relevant documents and publications.

‘To assist the Competent Authorities an indication is given at the end of the Guide on the steps to be taken to implement the recommendations.’

A response
Delia Grace, a veterinary and public health researcher at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), says: ‘This book is a competent compilation of common sense livestock-keeping principles and practices. Well-off, well-educated farmers (mainly in rich countries) are familiar with these and generally follow them (except when it is in their decided self-interest not to).

‘For poor farmers in poor countries, however, the recommendations are to a large extent unworkable. To give just a couple of examples: When a country has millions of poor livestock keepers and only dozens of veterinarians, how can farmers “Establish a working relationship with a veterinarian to ensure that animal health and welfare and disease notification issues are addressed” and  how (and why) should illiterate livestock keepers keep no less than six different sets of records about their farms (page 5)?’

‘Can farming practices be considered “good,”‘ Grace asks, ‘if they provide few direct benefits to those expected to carry them out? What is “good” for the resource-rich livestock owner is often demonstrably not “good”, or even feasible, for the resource-poor livestock keeper. FAO and OIE, two global bodies, have, understandably, recommended global standards that keep our livestock foods safe for human consumption. But these standards can be considered “standard” only by those (relatively few) livestock keepers with the wherewithal to uphold them. Most of the rest of the 1.3 billion people in the world who pursue livestock livelihoods will, also understandably, continue to apply their own, lower, standards of food safety—until such time as their socioeconomic and policy circumstances change, providing them with incentives to invest in higher standards of food safety.’

Find the guide at: Guide to good farming practices for animal production and food safety, FAO and OIE, 2010.

 

Veterinary officers meet to strengthen animal disease control in eastern Africa

Chief veterinary officers and heads of central veterinary laboratories from 10 countries met in Zanzibar from 24 to 26 Aug 2010 to plan how to enhance the preparedness, prevention and management of animal diseases.

Participants recommended strengthening regional cooperation and collaboration, particularly with key partners such as the Africa Union/Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources, the World Organisation for Animal Health, the East African Community, the ALive Secretariat, the United States Agency for International Development and the Southern African Centre for Infectious Disease Surveillance. The participants also reaffirmed the need for countries to adopt a common reporting system (including a more complete database on animal resources and management developed at country and regional levels) based on, and compatible with, the international reporting system for animal diseases, and progressed with the establishment of a Regional Service Laboratory by compiling a shortlist of possible locations for the laboratory (Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan and Tanzania) and agreeing on the criteria and procedures for selecting the site.

Read more … (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization)

 

OIE examines links between animal production, climate change and emerging diseases

The detection of links between animal production systems around the world, climate change and the epidemiological evolution of animal diseases was the focus of a meeting organised by the OIE with experts from several continents.

“The experts confirmed that there are correlations between the various factors linking animal production systems, human influence on the environment, climate change and emerging diseases, but they reaffirmed that these correlations involve mechanisms of very great complexity, making them extremely difficult to measure and the value of any forecasts most uncertain”, declared Dr Gideon Brückner from South Africa, who chaired the group of experts.

Read more … (OIE)

 

Updated OIE technical disease cards and summaries online

Collaboration among scientists from OIE Reference Laboratories around the world and other relevant experts has led to an updated compilation of 33 technical disease cards, including 32 OIE-listed priority diseases such as foot and mouth disease, highly pathogenic avian influenza, rift valley fever and bluetongue.

To make the information contained in some of the cards easily understandable for a broader audience, the OIE has also published a series of Animal Disease Information Summaries.

Read more … (OIE)

 

World veterinary agency to probe meat-climate link

The world’s top authority in farm animal health announced on Thursday it would launch a study into the role of meat in climate change.

The report, carried out by independent experts, is expected to be published “by the summer,” Bernard Vallat, head of the World Organisation for Animal Health, known by its French acronym of OIE, said in Paris.

It is the first time in its nearly 85-year history that the 175-nation OIE is to carry out an environmental investigation.

Read more (AFP – Google News)