As a new round of bird flu hits China, livestock scientist advises to ‘panic slowly’

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Susan MacMillan

At the chicken market in Xining, Lanzhou Province, China (photo on Flickr by Padmanaba01).

By Matthew Davis

The initial news reports were slim on details but the reaction was swift. There were at least three people dead in China after apparently contracting influenza from birds. Prices of soybean—a major ingredient in livestock feed—immediately took a dive.

Then the death toll rose to five, virus samples were detected in pigeons, and in Shanghai authorities began slaughtering poultry flocks. Within a few days the death count was up to seven, then nine. And people started to wonder about a connection to all those pig carcasses floating down Shanghai waterways.

Such is the confusing swirl of information emanating from the latest incident in which a worrisome disease has passed from animal to human, a phenomena—and a quite common one at that—known as zoonoses. In this instance, it’s an influenza virus called H7N9 that appears to have originated in wild or domestic bird populations, but much about its source remains murky.

For Delia Grace, a veterinary epidemiologist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) who spends most of her waking hours studying zoonotic events around the world, there are two essential facts to keep in mind as the situation in China evolves. And they embody how difficult it can be to craft a proper response.

One: the vast majority of zoonoses outbreaks do not escalate to crisis proportions. But, two: every now and then, as happened with Spanish flu in 1918 and AIDS in more recent times, an animal disease jumps to human hosts and causes a ‘civilization altering event’.

Grace suggests the appropriate reaction is to ‘panic slowly’. In other words, be prepared to move quickly if things get worse, but don’t over-react to the early reports. Also, keep in mind that, just based on what gets reported, a new disease emerges somewhere in the world about every four months.

For example, Grace noted that epidemiologists in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Middle East are probably more concerned right now about a new and deadly corona virus that as of late March had killed 11 of the 17 people known to have been infected. There is evidence that at least one of the infections may have originated in racing camels.

Grace advises decision-makers in the public and private sector to channel the impulse to take action toward addressing conditions that are intensifying zoonotic threats.

We know that in certain parts of the world, livestock intensification is being pushed well beyond the limits of anything we have done in agriculture in the past’, she said. ‘There are hundreds of thousands of animals packed together and little transparency about how they are being managed. And that’s making disease experts pretty nervous.’

But Grace cautions against focusing solely on the risks posed by certain livestock practices and ignoring the fact that livestock are a major source of food and income for 1 billion of the world’s poorest people. She worries that misguided reactions to emerging zoonotic diseases can end up doing significant harm to their lives and livelihoods.

For example, in 2009, the Egyptian government ordered the mass slaughter of pigs tended by Coptic Christians on the mistaken belief that the pigs were linked to the H1N1 flu pandemic. Also, the possible link in Asia between a different, and also deadly, form of avian influenza called H5N1 and ‘backyard’ poultry farming has prompted a shift to more industrial-scale production. Yet, as Grace points out, given the problems plaguing industrial operations in the region, this shift could actually increase the risk of zoonotic diseases while imperiling the food security of livestock keepers.

‘The proper reaction to the risks posed by emerging zoonotic diseases is not to indiscriminately slaughter animals. That could threaten the health of far more people by depriving them of their primary source of protein and other nutrients’, Grace said.

What we need to do is look at the many ways livestock production has gone wrong—lack of diversity in animals, using drugs to mask signs of diseases, dirty conditions—and put them to right.

Matthew Davis is a Washington DC-based science writer and policy analyst; he also serves as a senior consulting writer for Burness Communications.

ILRI PhotoBlog–‘Livestock Cultures’: ‘Eggs’ by Andy Warhol

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Susan MacMillan

'Eggs' - Andy Warhol, 1982, via WikiPaintings

Eggs, 1982, by Andy Warhol (via WikiPaintings).

Happy Easter!

To view ILRI poultry photographs, visit ILRI’s Poultry set on Flickr.

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In search of ‘the wild chicken’: ILRI and other geneticists unravel the past to help secure the future

Posted on December 3, 2012 by Susan MacMillan

ILRI and other geneticists are closing in on ‘the wild chicken’ that became the world’s favoured barnyard (all illustrations on this page on Flickr by Susan von Struensee, Art and Agriculture Series using Tagxedo).

The journal Science reports that ‘Researchers are melding genetics and archaeology to close in on the origin of the world’s most common bird—and potentially help protect a major source of animal protein.’

The article quotes Olivier Hanotte, a livestock geneticist now at the University of Nottingham who formerly spent 13 years at the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) helping to unravel the origins of a second domestication of cattle, in Africa. And it was in Nairobi that Hanotte first got interested in chickens. (Watch the 3.5-minute ILRI Film Chickens: The world’s most numerous livestock.)

‘. . . A key thrust of research in the past decade has been to track the genetic changes that turned a remarkably shy creature into today’s meat-and-eggs dynamo, with an eye to protecting and improving breeds. But this research has also given scientists the opportunity to unravel a long-standing mystery that fascinated Charles Darwin: Where, when, and how was the chicken domesticated? . . .

‘Researchers agree that the red jungle fowl gave rise to the barnyard chicken somewhere in South Asia. But they agree on little else. . . .

‘Identifying the chicken’s wild cousins and preserving their genetic diversity may one day prove critical for improving the stock, some researchers say. Genes from wild birds may help breed birds resistant to avian influenza and other illnesses, for example.

‘The red jungle fowl—Gallus gallus—ranges from the western foothills of the Himalaya Mountains to the tip of Sumatra. . . . . Unlike modern-day chickens, all roosters sport elaborate plumage, the females lack a comb, and both genders have thin, dark legs and can fly considerable distances. The fowl is also generally half the size of a White Leghorn domesticated chicken, but it can produce fertile offspring with domestic chickens.

‘Humans carried the easily portable bird around the world. How this began remains controversial. . . .

‘“We need to reconcile all the data,” says Olivier Hanotte, a geneticist at the University of Nottingham. He favors a single origin in northern Southeast Asia, based on the enormous diversity of chicken breeds there. . . .

‘Ultimately, researchers hope to get ancient DNA from well-dated bones. But “replicable DNA has been as rare as hen’s teeth,” Zeder says, thanks to contamination issues and tropical climes that degrade DNA. One team recently claimed to have mtDNA from an ancient Polynesian chicken bone in Chile—a dramatic find that would prove Polynesians reached the Americas before Columbus—but the find has been questioned as possibly contaminated (Science, 11 June 2010, p. 1344). Techniques are improving, however. . . .

[T]he genetic information in truly wild fowl could kill two birds with one stone, unraveling the chicken’s past while potentially ensuring its future. . . .

‘On a tidy farm in the mountains of northwest Vietnam, Chinese biologist Jianlin Han expertly grabs a nervous red jungle fowl recently captured in this region’s quickly disappearing forest. The bird—which sports a long and dangerously sharp spur—is part of Han’s hands-on effort to breed better animals to benefit the rural poor, while at the same time gathering a massive data set to understand the genetic underpinnings of the domestic chicken. Han, who grew up raising chickens in rural China, is as comfortable in the lab as in the barnyard. . . .

‘The chicken, which grows quickly and is the most intensely bred of domestic animals, provides an intriguing model for understanding those issues, says Han, who works for the International Livestock Research Institute based in Nairobi but spends most of his time in his Beijing lab and in the field across South Asia. . . . The goal is to produce a domes-ticated chicken that caters to local tastes while providing more meat and eggs. Han is also investigating the unusually high number of local varieties found in surrounding villages—many more than elsewhere in South Asia—which may be a hint that the chicken was originally domesticated in this rugged area. Han has an ambitious plan to catalog the genetic makeup of today’s jungle fowl, charting its diversity in different regions and also revealing whether it includes genes from domestic chickens. . . .

‘“Jianlin’s brute-force approach definitely has its merits,” says archaeologist Greger Larson of Durham University in the United Kingdom. “I suspect we can’t possibly know what all the variation is out there unless you go and sequence a ton of stuff.” Geneticist Olivier Hanotte of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom agrees . . . .

‘Han is also curious about what happens when chickens go feral. Natural selection reasserts itself when humans no longer make breeding deci-sions or provide regular food and protection. “This will help us understand how the genome works, and how plastic it is,” Han says. “This is the most fundamental biological question.” The lowly chicken may one day provide humans with more than just a cheap joke or a fast meal.’

Read the whole articles in Science: In search of the wild chicken and the accompanying feature article on Han Jianlin, From farmyard to the lab (News Focus, Animal Domestication), both by Andrew Lawler, 23 November 2012: 1020–1024.

Read related earlier articles on this blog: Research paper casts doubt on claims for pre-Colombian Chilean chickens, 13 Oct 2008, and Award-winning ILRI geneticist takes up prestigious UK appointment, 17 Dec 2008.

World Bank vice president Rachel Kyte in Nairobi town hall on ‘big picture agriculture’

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Susan MacMillan

On a visit to the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF)/CGIAR on 2 Feb 2012, World Bank vice president Rachel Kyte listens to presentations made by CIP’s Lydia Wamalwa and ILRI’s Sheila Ommeh (photo credit: ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

As Bill Gates prepares in America’s Pacific Northwest today for a live-streamed session (starting at 2:15 PST, UTC-8 hours), in which he will answer questions about his 2012 Annual Letter, where he argues for the importance of agricultural research for development, a similar Q&A session at a town hall was held early this morning in Nairobi with World Bank Vice President for Sustainable Development Rachel Kyte, who was video-linked so that all staff of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), which hosted the event, and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and other CGIAR centres in the Kenyan capital, could take part in the event.

The World Bank vice president, who also serves as the chair of the CGIAR Fund Council, covered much ground in her brief statement and responses to questions at the town hall this morning. Thoughtful, knowledgeable, and straight in her speaking, Kyte spoke of the importance of ‘climate-smart agriculture’ and of taking ‘landscape’ rather than piecemeal approaches to agricultural research for development. She spoke of the need to preserve the ‘public-good ethos’ of the CGIAR while reaching out to the private sector, and of the ‘profound commitment’ at the World Bank to increase global food security, reflected in the USD50 million the Bank annually provides to the CGIAR. While underscoring the importance of the work of the 15 CGIAR centres to sustainable development, and confirming donor interest in sustaining those centres, Kyte also said CGIAR donors, which have committed USD700 million of the CGIAR target of USD1 billion annual investment, also are looking for more efficiency and effectiveness in CGIAR centre work and for greater clarity of purpose in some of the proposals being submitted for multi-institutional CGIAR Research Programs.

This June’s Rio +20 conference offers us an opportunity for a greener and more sustainable world over the next 20 years,’ Kyte said. And now, she said, is the time to act, as ‘we’re still riding the “food security tiger”, which has, unusually, remained a high-profile issue ever since the food crisis in 2008.’

Gates and Kyte both appear to be interested in ‘big-picture agriculture’, which may be defined as seeking to understand and manage complex agricultural systems at the landscape level, assessing not only the productivity of these systems but also their sustainability and impacts on livelihoods of the poor. Such big-picture approaches are by necessity highly demanding of complex yet productive partnerships between research groups, governments, civil society and the private sector.

Jimmy Smith (pictured right, above), who came from the World Bank last year to become ILRI’s third director general, and Tony Simons, director general of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), welcomed the CGIAR community and Rachel Kyte to this town hall meeting, which was preceded by a brief tour of a few of ICRAF’s research facilities and short presentations by two early-career CGIAR agricultural scientists.

Sheila Ommeh is a young Kenyan scientist who received her PhD just last week in the field of chicken genetics. Ommeh explained to the Bank vice president that 70% of all chickens raised in Africa are native breeds that are rapidly disappearing through cross-breeding and the introduction of exotic breeds. Ommeh’s research is disclosing the value of conserving and better using many of Africa’s hardy native birds, which are an important source of scarce income and nutrition for poor households, especially the women and children in them.

Lydia Wamalwa is another Kenyan scientist, about to obtain her doctorate in plant molecular biology. Wamalwa is working with the International Potato Center (CIP) at the ILRI-Biosciences eastern and central Africa Hub to develop varieties of sweet potato genetically resistant to disease.

Wamalwa closed her presentation by saying that she hopes in 20 years’ time someone like herself will be in Kyte’s position at the Bank, continuing a winning struggle against poverty and hunger in Africa.

‘Twenty years?’ vice president Kyte said. ‘Make that five.’

For more pictures of the town hall meeting, visit ILRI’s Flickr website.

New project to reduce chicken disease in Ethiopia

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Paul Karaimu

A new study of genetic resistance to disease in Ethiopia’s indigenous chicken breeds is scheduled to start later this year. In collaboration with the Ethiopian Institute for Agricultural Research, the University of Liverpool, Roslin Institute, the Univerisity of Edinburgh and the University of Nottingham, researchers from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) will seek to identify ‘the causes of infectious diseases that have a major impact on poultry production in Ethiopia.’

Scheduled to start in September 2010, the study will take place in the district of Jarso, in eastern Ethiopia, and in Horro, in the west of the country. The results of this research will be linked to an ongoing poultry breeding program to improve resistance to ‘priority infectious diseases’ and thereby enhance the productivity of the country’s poultry sector.

Poultry play important economic, nutritional and socio-cultural roles in the livelihoods of poor rural households in Ethiopia and many other developing countries, where birds are widely integrated into smallholder production systems and help households cope with hunger and poverty.

Buying and rearing poultry is often a first step out of poverty. Women tend to own and manage chickens, usually native chicken varieties, which provide them with their only independent source of cash income.

Although breeding programs for local chickens have shown that rapid improvement in productivity is possible, researchers have yet to identify and select the optimal breeds for improving, by, for example, providing resistance to common infectious diseases.

Tadelle Dessie, a team leader of ILRI’s biotechnology theme in Ethiopia, and one of the leaders of the chicken project, says ‘enhanced genetic resistance through selective breeding is still an under-exploited low-cost opportunity for disease control in low-input poultry production systems’. He says the study will investigate genetic variability in the resistance of local chicken ecotypes to major infectious diseases hurting village poultry production in Ethiopia. Results of the research will inform strategies for improving both disease resistance and productivity.

Indigenous chicken varieties are well adapted to local environments, but local birds tend to grow slowly and produce fewer and smaller eggs than commercial varieties. Infectious diseases, however, can wipe out flocks of exotic, higher-producing, poultry.

Knowledge from this study should enable Ethiopian policymakers and animal health professionals to design more precise disease-control plans. The study itself should help improve Ethiopia’s scientific capacity in this field by training local scientists and enhancing laboratory facilities for poultry testing.

Staff are now being recruited for the project, which will be launched in September.

Research shows bird flu still a threat to poultry production in Kenya

Posted on June 28, 2010 by Paul Karaimu

Risk assessment shows Avian Influenza still a threat to poultry production in Kenya

The risk of avian flu on poultry production continues to be a threat to the livelihoods of many poor and livestock-reliant farmers in developing countries such as Kenya, researchers say.

Scientists from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) have found that poultry farmers in Kenya are ‘highly susceptible to the introduction and spread of the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI)’ because of the country’s location along key wild birds’ migratory routes and the absence of strong mechanisms to deal with a possible outbreak of the disease.

Like in many developing countries, poultry production is an important livelihood activity in Kenya. Most poultry is kept by small-scale farmers in non-commercial settings, who depend on income from the sale of eggs, animals and meat to sustain their livelihoods.

Results from a 2009 impact assessment conducted by ILRI, IFPRI and the Royal Veterinary College in London with support from the Department for International Development (DFID) on the ‘Role of Poultry in Kenyan Livelihoods and the Ex Ante Impact Assessment of HPAI on Livelihood outcomes’ show that farmers in the key poultry producing regions of the country are not adequately prepared to deal with an outbreak of avian influenza.

Though the country has not had an outbreak of avian flu, there were two scares in 2005 and 2005. The scares led to a slowdown in the industry as farmers, in fear of making losses, reduced flock sizes by up to 40 per cent. The two scares also led to a depressed market for poultry and poultry products and lowered the prices which negatively impacted farmers. The assessment showed that farmers in Kenya are still at risk especially because the country’s human and animal health services are not adequate. Coupled with the fact that most of the poultry farming in the country is a ‘backyard poultry system’ preventing and controlling disease outbreaks would be significantly difficult.

Among others, the results of the assessment also showed, like other studies had confirmed, that poultry production is largely done by women and children to support livelihoods and that most of the poultry in Kenya is produced in the country’s western and eastern regions. Farmers in these places are most at risk of loses in the event of a HPAI outbreak. Kenyan farmers keep an average flock size of 18 birds across the country but there are significant variations across regions mostly determined by ease of access to markets. Nairobi province, for example, has large producers (though fewer in number compared to other regions) with an average of 158 birds per flock because of access to ready market for their animals.

The assessment found that ‘households with “larger” small-scale flocks as well as those located in high risk areas (Western, Nyanza and parts of Eastern provinces) are vulnerable to HPAI. In the event of an outbreak, the disease would cause ‘significant reduction in livestock income and wealth (asset value) and total annual household income would be reduced.’

The results of this assessment were first published as ‘The role of poultry in Kenyan livelihoods and the ex ante impact assessment of HPAI on Livelihood outcomes’ by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). A full report of the assessment can be found in the following link http://www.ifpri.org/sites/default/files/publications/hpairb11.pdf

For more information visit www.hpai-research.net

Research paper casts doubt on claims for pre-Colombian Chilean chickens

Posted on October 13, 2008 by ILRIComms

But ancient chicken DNA obtained from Easter Island may represent a genetic signature of an early Polynesian dispersal of chickens.

Did some native Amerindian breeds of chicken pre-date the arrival in the Americas of European chickens with the Spanish in the 15th century?

Many would like to think so. Such evidence is used to support ancient trading contact between Polynesian and South American Indians. Some have passionately argued the case for pre-Colombian chickens, citing in particular the unusual Chilean Araucana and Passion Fowl breeds.

The Araucana breed, for example, thought to be descended from indigenous Amerindian chickens, lays blue/green-shelled eggs and has distinctive plumage. Because features of its plumage are also found among Asian rather than Mediterranean chickens, it’s been hypothesized that the Araucana breed might have an Asian origin. A similar origin has been posited for Chile’s Passion Fowl. It is thought by some that these historic Chilean breeds could have arrived with early Polynesian or Dutch traders on the Pacific Coast of South America.

But a recent scientific paper published in the prestigious USA Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (29 July 2008) says that molecular evidence counters such an early introduction via Polynesia. Results of this research investigation into the putative ancient Polynesian lineage of Chile’s native chickens indicate an Indo-European genetic origin. This paper has generated a lively debate that is still on-going. (See, for example, the subsequent Letter to the Editor of PNAS from Storey.)
Other recent research suggests that there were multiple centres of origin for the domestication of the chicken across both Southeast Asia and the Indian sub-continent. The high genetic similarity between European and Indian sub-continent mitochondrial DNA sequences suggests that the latter was the main source for chickens introduced into Europe.

This molecular evolutionary genetic analysis of the origin of Chile’s native chickens was carried out by scientists working in nine institutes across the globe. Animal geneticists and archaeologists at four universities in Australia (Sydney, Adelaide, Queensland and the Australian National University) worked with archaeologists from the University of Durham (UK), medical biochemists and microbiologists from Uppsala University (Sweden), geneticists from Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (which extracted the DNA samples) and livestock geneticists working at the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and a Beijing Joint Laboratory on Livestock and Forage Genetic Resources (JLLFGR) run jointly by ILRI and China’s Institute of Animal Sciences. ILRI and JLLFGR did the PCR and DNA sequencing work for this study. Researchers working in ILRI’s labs in Nairobi and Beijing are working to improve understanding of the diversity in backyard chicken populations and production systems so as to reduce chicken diseases and subsequent poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.

Interestingly, although this molecular evolutionary detective work provides no support for a pre-Colombian Polynesian introduction of chickens to South America, DNA sequences from ancient chicken remains obtained from two archaeological sites on Easter Island represent a genetic signature of an early Polynesian, rather than 15th century Spanish, introduction of chickens to the island.
Lying far off the coast of Chile and named by Dutch sailors who landed there on Easter Sunday in 1722, Easter Island is famous for the more than 800 iconic stone statues, called moai, of giant heads that dot its landscape. The ancient chicken specimens from Easter Island are clearly pre-European, indicating that they form part of an original ‘Polynesian/Pacific’ chicken dispersal possibly subsequently erased across the western Polynesian islands.

The lineages of domestic plants and animals are often replaced by later introductions of the same domestic species with a different genetic heritage, thus erasing evidence of the initial dispersal. It is thus possible that the Indo-European chicken haplotypes found in Chile may have formed a more recent wave of dispersals, overwriting and removing earlier Indonesian sequences across western Polynesia but failing to do the same on distant Easter Island.

But at present, there is no evidence to support an ancient Asia Pacific route for the introduction of Indo-European chickens into Chile.

More research is needed to resolve the timing and nature of introductions, modern diversity and regional adaptation of local chicken breeds in South America, Easter Island and Southeast Asia. Of particular interest will be chickens kept by some indigenous communities in the Amazon forest, the origins of which remain a mystery.

‘The origin of South America’s first chickens remains debatable today,’ says Han Jianlin, an author of this paper, who heads the ILRI-Chinese Joint Lab in Beijing. ‘But I predict that we will have the definitive answer within the next five years. That’s how fast this molecular detective work is moving.’

‘What is remarkable about this work,’ says Olivier Hanotte, another ILRI author of the paper, who leads an ILRI project to characterize indigenous animal genetic resources of the developing world, ‘is that it is allowing us to tackle major questions about human history that we would not have been able even to ask just 20 years ago.’

‘We didn’t set out in this research,’ says Hanotte, ‘to advance understanding of the history of the world’s farming societies. But that’s just where this research—conducted to characterize chicken genetic resources of and for the poor—has led us.~

Further Information Contact:
Olivier Hanotte
Molecular Biologist, ILRI
Nairobi, KENYA
Email: o.hanotte@cgiar.org
Telephone: +254 (20) 422 3000

Han Jianlin
Scientist & Head, ILRI-Chinese Joint Lab in Beijing
Beijing, CHINA
Email: h.jianlin@cgiar.org

Controlling bird flu in Indonesia through local knowledge

Posted on April 2, 2007 by ILRIComms

‘Participatory epidemiology’ – an approach to controlling livestock diseases pioneered by ILRI’s Jeff Mariner and colleague Christine Jost – is being used to improve control of bird flu in Indonesia.

Indonesia has the worst bird flu problem in the world. Experts fear that the country provides the perfect setting for the highly pathogenic form of avian influenza, H5N1, to evolve into a form easily passed among humans, touching off a global pandemic. Through an approach known as ‘participatory epidemiology’, teams of veterinarians are tapping into local knowledge of where and when bird flu outbreaks are occurring and then enlisting villagers’ cooperation in control efforts.

The H5N1 virus is endemic among poultry throughout much of Indonesia. ‘You simply couldn’t get more virus in the environment,’ says Jeffrey Mariner, a veterinarian at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), in Nairobi, who is helping train surveillance teams under the auspices of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.

To establish a systematic control program, officials will have to track where and when outbreaks of bird flu are occurring, especially among the estimated 300 million chickens kept in backyards by 60% of all Indonesian households. That’s the challenge for a new approach called ‘participatory epidemiology’ pioneered by Jeff Mariner and his colleague Christine Jost, an assistant professor at Tufts University, in Massachusetts. By talking to villagers and about disease incidences and symptoms, researchers can gather valuable epidemiological data on how disease is spreading and kept in circulation, which in turn informs control strategies. Mariner and Jost pioneered participatory epidemiology to help control rinderpest in Africa. This approach enabled authorities in Sudan to target vaccination programs that eradicated rinderpest from the country. Although participatory approach has never been tried for avian influenza and has never been tried on such a large scale for any disease, international and Indonesian animal health officials believe that this approach will be a key component for bringing the H5N1 crisis under control, both in Indonesia and elsewhere in the developing world.

Early in 2006, with USD1.5 million in funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a pilot program was established in 12 districts in Java comprising two teams of publicly funded vets specializing in either participatory disease surveillance or participatory disease response. The teams ‘turned up much more avian influenza than anyone expected,’ Mariner says. ‘Poultry populations were fully saturated with the disease.’

Those alarming results persuaded Indonesian authorities and international experts to push for a rapid expansion of participatory epidemiology. Even though coverage of the country is still fairly limited, the data being accumulated are providing clues to what keeps the virus in circulation.

Participatory response is an important part of the program. Mariner says that until recently the standard response was for government vets to indiscriminately cull all poultry around the villages where infected birds were found and then vaccinate widely. This mass culling, known as ‘stamping out’, causes resentment among smallholders, who may correctly believe that their birds have not been exposed to the virus. Delays in compensation exacerbate the ill feelings. The participatory approach aims to involve villagers in decisions—ideally, to cull all poultry directly exposed to infected birds, with immediate compensation, and then vaccinate other birds in the vicinity. Mariner says that even smallholders can be convinced of the need to cull birds that have been directly exposed to H5N1-infected chickens.

At the same time that Indonesia is verifying the effectiveness of participatory epidemiology, the country, with FAO support and financing from the United States, Australia and Japan, is planning to extend the program to all of Java and Bali and parts of Sumatra by next May.

This article was taken from a longer article published in Science on 5 January 2007 titled: Indonesia Taps Village Wisdom to Fight Bird Flu.

Download article (subscription required): http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/315/5808/30

Poultry maps prepared for fight against bird flu: Higher resolution maps urgently needed

Posted on April 28, 2006 by ILRIComms

Africa is now fighting bird flu literally in its backyards. Seven countries have now confirmed they have the deadly H5N1 virus in their poultry populations.

These are Nigeria, Egypt, Niger, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Sudan and Côte d'Ivoire. Egypt has reported Africa's first cases of human infections, (13 to date) which have killed five people.

Worldwide, bird flu has hit 46 countries, killed 115 people, caused some 200 million birds to be killed at a cost of around 20 billion US dollars, and ruined the livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers whose livelihoods depend on poultry keeping.

From 2003 to 2005 the virus was reported in 15 countries. But in the first four months of this year, it moved rapidly to 31 new countries, with major outbreaks in Turkey, Iraq, Israel, Gaza, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanmar and India as well as the seven African states.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is working with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) to improve veterinary services that, in many of the affected countries, have been under-resourced for decades.

Dr David Nabarro, the UN's chief coordinator for avian influenza underscored the importance of using veterinary services to fight bird flu and the world's other emerging diseases of a communicable kind, '70 percent of which come from animals', he said.

What ILRI is doing to help its neighbours and partners fight bird flu
Like many of its partner organizations in livestock research for development, the Africa-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) has been pooling its resources to contribute to the fight against this deadly disease. An internal task force is working on a number of fronts.

Several ILRI staff members sit on national avian influenza task forces set up in ILRI's hosting countries of Kenya and Ethiopia and are advising on the design of research support to control efforts in Nigeria. (Kenya's preparedness plan is considered one of the best in the developing world.) These ILRI staff are providing their veterinary and research expertise to advise on surveillance, monitoring diagnosis and control programs established to prevent or control the disease in poultry.

ILRI scientists are also preparing studies intended to generate practical information for immediate use by authorities, veterinarians and the public. These studies will compare different control strategies and assess their impacts on the poor and assist governments to prepare action plans for surveillance, control and containment of outbreaks. In longer term research, ILRI and its partners have proposed exploring the genetic make-up of chickens to unravel attributes influencing infection and transmission of the highly pathogenic form of avian influenza in various breeds.

Bird flu consultation to be held in Nairobi
In addition, ILRI and its sister Future Harvest Centre, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), are convening a consultation of interested partners from the international research community to explore ways in which research can support efforts to control highly pathogenic avian influenza. This scientific consultation will focus on the needs of developing countries and their poor populations of poultry keepers, sellers and consumers. The meeting will be held at ILRI's Nairobi headquarters, probably in early June (dates will be confirmed shortly).

Participants at the meeting will respond to requests ILRI, IFPRI and other research institutions are receiving from donor organizations. Donors want to know how to target their bird flu research investments so as ensure that those investments support effective control of the disease while minimizing the negative impacts on the poor. ILRI is also assembling a team to undertake a rapid appraisal of past experiences in controlling bird flu. Because implementing conventional response strategies against bird flu in many developing countries can be problematical and may place particular hardship on the poor, many of whom rely on poultry for their livelihoods, this rapid research study aims to synthesize lessons learned and identify strategies that may offer more 'nuanced' means of controlling the disease while protecting the livelihoods of the poor.

Poultry maps are prepared for the battle against bird flu

Global livestock maps
In 2002, ILRI produced livestock density maps (see Mapping Poverty and Livestock in the Developing World by Thornton et al., ILRI, 2002) derived from new analyses locating major populations of poor people (including poor livestock keepers), assessing how these populations are likely to change over the next half century, and showing estimated populations of different types of livestock around the world.

African and global chicken maps
In recent weeks, using data sets provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), ILRI prepared Africa and global maps of chicken densities. These maps are being used to determine areas under greatest threat and to help those countries already afflicted to target their disease control efforts.

Although the FAO-derived maps are based on the world's best information, they should be treated as indicative only; we caution against their over-interpretation (see Background Information below). This kind of macro-level analysis, while useful as a starting point, hides enormous variability, and thus can be dangerous if relied upon as a sole source of information. Ultimately, the fight against bird flu in Africa has to be conducted at much higher resolutions of basic information. (For an editorial on our lack of sufficient information, see Nature's Dreams of flu data. As the Nature editorial puts it, 'We have better data on galaxies 10 billion light years away than on human cases of avian flu in China or Vietnam.')

As ILRI agricultural systems analyst Philip Thornton, who headed ILRI's global livestock and poverty mapping project, says, 'The collation, maintenance and dissemination of baseline data is seldom supported in the agriculture sector. But in many ways, this data work is crucial to agricultural development and poverty alleviation. Information on livestock numbers and breeds in our African livestock databases is remarkably poor. Moreover, it seems clear that bird densities have to be assessed at relatively high resolution, given the heterogeneity involved.'

The maps do illustrate, however, the wide extent of 'backyard' chicken keeping in Africa—and thus the likely ubiquitous nature of any adverse impacts on the poor stemming from the appearance of bird flu or programs implemented to control it. The African and global chicken maps underscore the need to vastly upscale efforts to collect and improve our baseline information on poultry keeping. Indeed, the poverty of our information on poultry keeping in Africa is one of the biggest challenges facing agencies committed to fighting the new scourge.

Global Chicken Density

The chicken density map for Africa, below, represents a snapshot of chicken distribution for the mid- to late 1990s at sub-national level. The white areas on the map represent areas that have no reported livestock numbers available. Despite limited data, this map gives an indication of the enormous threat bird lu poses to sub-Saharan Africa.

Africa Poultry Map

Uganda poultry map
With 2002 household data from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, ILRI produced in March 2006 high-resolution poultry maps for Uganda. The maps give important details on densities of local chickens, exotic chickens, ducks, geese and guinea fowl. Most local chickens are reared in the northeastern region and there is a high density of exotic chickens around major urban centres—Kampala, Jinja, Entebbe, Masaka, Mpigi and Mbarara—where demand has outstripped supply of local chickens. To view the Uganda maps, see ILRI's previous Top Story, Bird Maps for Uganda.

ILRI Top Story, 4 April 2006

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