One world, one health

Posted on April 18, 2006 by ILRIComms

Holistic approaches to controlling the 'perfect storm' of health problems in poor countries, particularly Africa's catastrophic disease burden, must include better control of diseases transmitted between animals and people.

A paper to be published this May 2006 in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) journal PLoS Medicine, a peer-reviewed open-access journal (available online at www.plosmedicine.org) advocates linking integrated work on ‘neglected’ tropical diseases with major global health partnerships recently formed to tackle the three most devastating diseases of the poor: malaria, TB and AIDS. The authors of the paper, which include development economist Jeffrey Sachs, argue that while new partnerships and initiatives have significantly raised funding and awareness of the need to scale up the fight against the ‘big three’ diseases, conspicuously absent is work on a group of ‘neglected tropical diseases’ that may threaten the poor as much as malaria, TB and AIDS and for which there are already cheap and effective control strategies. The authors propose that our success in controlling the big three may depend on a concurrent attack on this group of neglected diseases, which include three vector-borne protozoan infections (leishmaniasis, human African trypanosomosis and Chagas disease), three bacterial infections and seven kinds of helminth (worm) infections.

The potential benefits of taking a more holistic approach to disease control are being popularized in complementary initiatives advocating ‘one health’ strategies that simultaneously address human and animal health. (See, for example, a new book exploring grass roots ideas from East and Southern Africa on how to integrate wildlife, livestock and human health for both conservation and development: ‘One World, One Health’ is available online from LEAD, the Livestock, Environment and Development Initiative.

ILRI supports these holistic health approaches and further argues that another class of neglected diseases of the poor—‘zoonotic’ diseases, or those transmitted between people and animals—should be included. Zoonotic diseases account for a remarkable 75% of all human diseases and include such emerging diseases as avian influenza. Esther Schelling, a veterinary epidemiologist on joint appointment with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the Swiss Tropical Institute, points out that zoonotic diseases are virtually excluded from most health initiatives ‘because they’re simply not accounted for’. ILRI is helping to ensure that they are accounted for and that methods to control them are friendly to the poor.

Two papers on this topic by Schelling and colleagues are available online:
British Medical Journal article
Lancet article

Carlos Seré, director general of ILRI, says that with the sequence in recent years of BSE (‘mad cow disease’), foot-and-mouth disease, and now bird flu, there is definitely increasing interest in zoonotic diseases.

‘Donors like the Welcome Trust’, he says, ‘are increasing their investment in tropical animal disease research. Our own strategy is to develop appropriate methods for researchers and policy-makers to evaluate the risk of these zoonotic diseases and together identify the most promising strategies and policies that can help to reduce such risk, particularly for the poor. We have activities specifically looking at zoonoses such as brucellosis and bovine TB, and we are building up our expertise in food safety issues. Strengthening our expertise on food safety and the risks posed by zoonoses is central to two of ILRI’s strategic research themes, the first on sustaining lands and livelihoods which involves protecting human health, and the second on improving livestock-related market opportunities in domestic and international markets, which are increasingly threatened by such food safety concerns.’

In relation to bird flu, Dr Seré explains, ‘ILRI will not be the virologists or poultry specialists. But we have comparative strength in systems analysis, which combines social science with epidemiology and animal genetics and other lab bench research to address complex health problems. We do this in conjunction with partners who bring more specific expertise, such as in poultry or vaccines. What we specifically bring to the picture is a “poverty lens” to understand the implications of health problems, issues and control strategies on the poorest populations in the world.’

‘Clearly, research is not a “rapid deployment tool”’, he says. ‘There are other organizations—such as the World Health Organisation (www.who.org), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (www.fao.org), and the World Animal Health Organisation (www.oie.org) —that have a regulatory mandate and policy responsibility and are linked directly to governments. ILRI’s comparative advantage is in the longer term: in understanding the issues and in providing sound technical research to back these agencies which are doing the short-term response work. As we see more and more that boundaries don’t work, that disease is a global problem, we encourage industrialized countries to share their resources with developing countries, not just out of enlightened self-interest, but also, for example, to ensure food safety for their domestic consumers. And finally, we are particularly interested in helping developing countries to build their own research capacity to understand, model and control complex disease problems.

The collective power of smallholder farmers

Posted on April 18, 2006 by ILRIComms

Kenya's new Dairy Development Policy aims to bring Kenya's estimated 39,000 informal milk traders into the formal sector.

BBC World Service began to broadcast a Kenya dairy story on 6 April 2006, the same day Kenya’s Minister for Livestock and Fisheries Development, Joseph Munyao, presented a new Dairy Development Policy in Nairobi – the final step before the new Policy and accompanying Dairy Development Bill are presented to Kenya’s Parliament.

Kenya’s new Dairy Policy now broadly reflects the approach the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and its partners have advocated over the past several years – the need to engage with and develop the country’s hugely important informal milk market, which provides a livelihood to an estimated 1.8 million smallholder households.

The new Dairy Policy now clearly acknowledges the role of the informal market actors in the development of the sector. The policy states that it will ‘facilitate the transformation of the informal milk trade towards formalisation’. Specific measures mentioned include development of low-cost and appropriate technologies for small investors, training programmes on safe milk handling, efforts to improve the standards of milk processing in the informal sector, provision of incentives for improved milk handling, and establishment of a supportive milk dealer certification system. The Dairy Policy also announces that the Kenya Dairy Board functions will be streamlined and steps will be taken so that the Board regulates itself and is managed by its stakeholders.

The new Dairy Policy is a huge step forward in a struggle that has been ongoing since 1998, when Kenya’s big milk buyer (Kenya Co-operative Creameries) went into liquidation. Various attempts were subsequently made to oust smallholders from the market, including media campaigns advising that unpasteurized (‘raw’) milk was unsafe and should not be consumed. The BBC Kenya Dairy Story, broadcast on its World Service, tells how the smallholders, supported by ILRI and partners, fought back, and how they are now being brought into the formal milk market. The Kenya Dairy Story was broadcast from 6-13 April 2006.

Small is Beautiful – The Kenya Dairy Story
Kenyans love their milk. Most of the 4 billion litres consumed there each year is produced by smallholders with a couple of cows, and sold house-to-house by thousands of street hawkers and doorstep milkmen. But this whole milk business was under threat. In the third edition of the One Planet series (on BBC World Service) which is sharing small business success, Susie Emmett discovers how the farmers and traders fought back to keep the milk flowing.

Listen to a recording of the BBC World Service broadcast produced by WRENmedia.

Note: The latest numbers

Some of the numbers quoted in this BBC World Service broadcast ‘Small is beautiful’ have been obtained from much earlier estimates. These figures, however, grossly understate the true size and extent of Kenya’s milk sector. SDP has provided recalculated figures, which more accurately reflect the picture in Kenya today.

1. Smallholder dairy farms recalculates to be 1.8 million (up from 800,000)

The estimated 800,000 smallholder farms has been widely cited for many years, during which time Kenya’s population has grown significantly. SDP recalculates the number of smallholders to be 1.8 million.

2. Milk hawkers recalculated to be 39,650 (up from 30,000)

SDP recalculates the number of small milk vendors in Kenya to be 39,650.

3. Number of dairy cattle recalculated to be 6.7 million (up from 3 million)
There are concerns about the reliability of the official cattle figures for Kenya; no livestock census has been conducted for decades and the methods used to estimate cattle numbers are imprecise. A conservative estimate of the size of the national dairy herd using detailed SDP survey data suggests that there are about 6.7 million dairy cattle (2.7 million high grade and 4 million crosses) owned by 1.8 million rural smallholder farms mainly in the Kenyan Highlands. This projected cattle population is more than twice the officially reported figure of 3 million for the national herds.

4. Total milk produced recalculated to be 4 billion litres per annum (up from 3 billion)
Based on SDP’s recalculated cattle projections above, SDP recalculates total milk production in the rural highlands to be an estimated 4 billion litres per annum.

5. Annual consumption of milk recalculated to be 145 litres per person (up from 100 litres)
SDP recalculates annual milk consumption by Kenyans to be 145 litres per person, making Kenyans amongst the highest milk consumers in the developing world. The rural areas have an estimated population of about 14.5 million people. Assuming that the estimated 9.6 million people living in the urban areas mainly depend on milk from the high potential areas, and that 13 percent of production goes to calf feed or spoilage loss, milk availability from the highlands was estimated to be about 145 litres per person per year. Previously, milk consumption in Central and Rift Valley provinces, which are important milk production areas, has been estimated to be between 144 and 152 litres per person per year.

Source: SDP Policy Brief No.10.

Highlights from the Kenya Dairy Story broadcast by BBC World Service:
In Kenya, a knock on the door means the milkman is here – today as everyday – delivering fresh raw milk to one of his many grateful customers. “I like this milk because this one comes daily, and it is fresh and good, that’s why I like it” says one of his customers.

This milk vendor serves approximately 60 customers, and sells approximately 100 litres of raw milk, each and every day. In Kenya, more than 30,000 milk hawkers [recalculated in August 2006 to be 39,650] are out daily on their bicycles or pushing carts to deliver nutritious milk from 800,000 small dairy farms [recalculated in August 2006 to have risen to 1.8 million].

Despite all its success, this whole wonderful milk business was under threat. The government here, as in so many countries, decided that small-scale farmers and traders couldn’t supply milk as safely as large farms and dairies. So, how come the hawkers are still in business, as are the smallholder dairy farmers whose milk they sell?

Kenya has three million improved dairy cattle [recalculated in August 2006 to have risen to 6.7 million] – that’s the largest dairy herd in Africa – and most of them are on small farms. Almost half the three billion litres of milk they produce are sold direct from small farms to households nearby. So the question is, can smallholder farmers produce clean, safe milk? Research by ILRI and others says yes – and changed lives because of it.

But what about that other all-important business criteria: efficiency; are the smallholder dairy farmers here in Kenya efficient? Steve Staal, agricultural economist at ILRI, says research shows smallholder dairy farmers are actually very competitive. ‘Indeed, small-scale mixed crop-and-livestock production is likely to be a more sustainable way to intensify agricultural production in environmental terms than large-scale industrial livestock production’, says Staal.

The biggest threat to smallholders came a few years ago when the one big buyer in Kenya – The Kenya Cooperative Creameries – went bust. Government policies did not recognize the small-scale operators and thus they were deemed to be operating illegally. Amos Omore is part of the team at ILRI trying to boost dairy incomes for the poor. He remembers how big dairy business was not going to let Kenya’s 800,000 [1.8 million] new milk entrepreneurs get in their way. It was a clash between big and small.

Kenya’s official ban on milk hawking was based on the milk not being safe. The nation’s newspapers carried many such stories. In the face of this scare-mongering, researchers got researching. David Mwangi at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), says that the public health risks being talked about were minimal – ‘almost not there’.On average, Kenyans drink 100 litres of milk a year, [recalculated in August 2006 to be 144–152 litres of milk a year] making them among the highest milk consumers in the developing world. But they don’t drink milk as it comes. ILRI’s Omore says the research showed that most consumers boil fresh milk before drinking it, which makes it as safe as pasteurized milk.

Gathering this evidence was a huge step. Using that evidence to change policy and mindsets was another.

KARI’s Mwangi says, ‘We worked with advocacy groups and hosted a high-profile meeting. And we had facts to table there.’ This research helped lead to the Kenya Dairy Board approving training for smallholder milk producers and traders. That’s important: most members of smallholder dairy cooperatives depend on their milk money to educate their children. Furthermore, easing restrictions against small traders helps poor customers because of the price of processed milk is beyond the means of most poor people here.’

John Kutwa, a former ILRI technician in the dairy team, says that ‘small’ characterizes most of Kenya’s milk business. ‘It’s small farmers selling to small traders and processors who deliver to small (poor) consumers.’

ILRI’s Amos Omore has been battling on behalf of smallholder milk producers and sellers since their troubles began. And he’s battling still. ‘Right now the policy environment has shifted towards small-scale traders’ he says. But the change is not yet complete. Small businesses are important but often overlooked.

‘Changing policies takes time’, he says, ‘and so does changing attitudes. In this country in the 1960s and 70s, it was always assumed that development projects should be “mega” to achieve some quantum leap in development. But if you look at development holistically – in terms of employment, in terms of nutrition, in terms of cash flow – these are the stepping stones that allow people to move from one living standard to the next. Small is beautiful! Small should not be sacrificed at the altar of large-scale businesses that often fail.’

International Women’s Day, 8 March 2006

Posted on March 8, 2006 by ILRIComms

Africa's women livestock farmers fulfill on Africa's renewal

To celebrate International Women's Day (http://www.internationalwomensday.com/) today, ILRI highlights a few of the major contributions made by Africa’s ‘WILD’ women—‘Women in Livestock Development’—to the continent’s renewal through economic, nutritional and environmental security.

Millions of women livestock farmers remain the majority of African farmers, the backbone of African agriculture, the food-security managers of African households, and the key to Africa’s renewal.

Why livestock? Because livestock ownership by women is more common than land ownership. Because even landless women are raising small domesticated animals to feed, clothe and educate their children. Because increasing women’s access to farm animals—the ‘living assets’ most commonly available to the poor worldwide—is a ready way to empower women otherwise severely marginalized.

African Women's Contribution to African Agriculture

A Fairer Deal for Women

Identifying the Real Farmer

Milk, Eggs and Meat

Women's Roles and Ownership of Assets

Increasing Assets in Women's Hands

Pro-Women Approaches to Technology Development and Selection

Women Farmers Uptake of Disease Control Methods

Women's Preferred Livestock: Income Distribution and Time Costs

Disease control: Protecting Women's Preferred Livestock

Women's Access to Technologies and Know-How

Vulnerability to Effects of Livestock Diseases

Click here for resource documents and further information

WILD Contributors: Susan MacMillan, Janice Njoroge, Grace Ndungu, Maria Mulindi, Christine Thuranira and Margaret Macdonald-Levy.

ILRI vaccine advances published in February 2006 PNAS journal

Posted on February 23, 2006 by ILRIComms

Public-private partnership makes major step towards improving livestock health and reducing poverty.

The devastating effects of East Coast fever on the livelihoods of small-scale farmers may one day be a thing of the past as a team of international scientists moves closer towards the development of a vaccine.

“East Coast fever is an intractable problem that ravages cattle of the poor in Africa. The good news is that this can be solved by high-tech science and technological innovations, achievable through strategic partnerships’’. Evans Taracha – ILRI East Coast Fever Vaccine Project Leader

Every year, East Coast fever destroys the small farmer’s dream of escaping poverty in Africa. Killing more than a million cattle and costing some $200 million annually, this tick-borne disease rages across a dozen countries in eastern and central Africa. Now, an international team of scientists has taken the first major step toward a vaccine to prevent East Coast fever. Their work, published in the February 13-17 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), shows how genomics can generate pivotal new vaccines.

In the study, scientists from five institutions, including the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), identify five vaccine targets, or candidate proteins that could form the basis for an East Coast fever subunit vaccine. Based on combined bioinformatics analyses and lab tests, these proteins appear to provide a protective immune response to the disease. “This initiative took just three years, after many years of scientists trying other methods,” remarks Vishvanath Nene, former ILRI staff member, a study author and molecular biologist at TIGR. “It’s a huge jump forward.”

To make the jump, researchers used the genome sequence of the parasite responsible for East Coast fever. A tick-borne parasite, Theileria parva, causes the disease. When ticks infected with T. parva bite cattle, they transmit the parasite, launching the disease that typically kills cattle within a month. In July, 2005, TIGR led a research team that published T. parva’s genome sequence, representing roughly 4,000 genes, in Science.

In the current study, Nene, along with Malcolm Gardner and Claire Fraser-Liggett, also of TIGR, relied on known biology to search T. parva’s genome for potential vaccine proteins. First, scientists know that immunity to the parasite, and thus East Coast fever, emerges from immune system cells known as killer T cells. Second, they know that T. parva is an intracellular pathogen–it infects and secretes proteins inside cattle white blood cells, which become malignant. The white blood cell then unwittingly passes small fragments of the secreted parasitic proteins associated with a certain type if its own proteins along to its cell surface. And this is where a vaccine could come in: A vaccine made of the T. parva proteins found on the surface of host cells should trigger an immune response in cattle. Vaccinated cattle would then be protected from the parasite.

To find potential vaccine antigens, the TIGR researchers scanned T. parva’s entire genome for genes that make secreted proteins. In particular, they searched for genes that make a “secretion signal,” a telltale peptide sequence found at the start of secreted proteins. Sure enough, the scientists found some 400 T. parva genes containing the secretion signal. This set of genes provided a starting pool of candidate proteins. Based on further tests, the study’s research team, led by ILRI of Nairobi, Kenya, cloned 55 candidate antigen genes and screened those genes for response by killer T cells taken from cattle immune to East Coast fever. To complement TIGR’s gene selection strategy, ILRI also incorporated a random screen of T. parva DNA for vaccine candidates.

In total, the team found five candidate vaccine antigens. In lab tests, these antigens triggered a response from cattle immune killer T cells. Going a further step further, the scientists inoculated cattle with these antigens and then gave the cattle a potentially lethal dose of T. parva. When compared with control animals, vaccinated cattle showed significantly stronger immune response to the parasite.

“This study is a true milestone,” says Fraser-Liggett, president of TIGR. “It’s one of the first to take advantage of genomic technologies and build a test vaccine using immune killer T cells as a screening reagent.” In addition to TIGR and ILRI, the research team included scientists from: the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Brussels; the Wellcome Trust Center for Human Genetics in Oxford; Sanofi Pasteur in Toronto; the University of Edinburgh; and Merial SAS, an international animal health company. ILRI and Merial have partnered to develop a vaccine against East Coast fever.

By using genomics to understand and fight T. parva, scientists may make advances against related parasites that cause malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases in which killer T cells also play a role in immunity. What’s more, because T. parva launches a cancer-like illness inside the white blood cells of cattle, it may provide a model system for understanding the mechanics of cancer biology.

But for Nene, who was born in Kenya and worked at ILRI for 15 years before coming to TIGR in 2001, the march against East Coast fever is significant reward, itself. “This disease takes an enormous toll on the local society and economy of rural areas across eastern and central Africa, including Maasai and other pastoral communities,” he says. In particular, East Coast fever kills cattle kept by families trying to rise out of poverty. If researchers are successful, Nene notes, the entire region will have new reason to hope for a better life. Evans Taracha, ILRI project leader, also highlights the importance of strategic research partnerships to overcome this and similar diseases.

TIGR’s portion of the PNAS study was funded independently by TIGR and by sub-contract from the Animal Health Program of the United Kingdom Department for International Development, with previous contributions from J. Craig Venter and the ILRI for the T. parva genome project.

Experts meet in Nairobi, project futuristic livestock scenarios for developing countries

Posted on February 22, 2006 by ILRIComms

Group of 25 experts enters 'uncharted waters' in building futuristic livestock scenarios that force new thinking and new decisions.

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) hosted a group of 25 livestock and futures experts from around the world for two and a half days 13–15 February 2006 to do some non-crystal-ball-gazing. The experts constructed alternative scenarios of likely futures of livestock development in developing countries, paying particular attention to what will happen to poor people.

They got help from, Jerome Glenn, who is an expert in ‘futures research’ and director of a think tank called the Millennium Project, which has been running under the aegis of the American Council for the United Nations University since 1991.

Decision-makers in ILRI and FAO and other livestock research and development institutions are the target of the products of this meeting. The idea behind this work is to force serious, flexible thinking about alternative possibilities for the future and begin to come up with the right mix of strategic decisions that will allow people to adapt to the future. The process of doing this work can alter the way decision makers think about the future. That, says Glenn, may be the most important outcome of the meeting.

‘The germ of a future-oriented collective intelligence on livestock development for the poor was created here,’ Glenn said at the close of the meeting. ‘What we believe is possible for livestock development is “pretty poultry”’, he punned. ‘Here, for example, are just a few of the things that were not yet in the world in 1980: personal computers, the World Wide Web, cellular phones, AIDS, the European Union and the World Trade Organisation. The world has changed dramatically in the last 25 years. What is guaranteed is that we will have even more and faster changes in the future. This meeting was held to enlarge the capacity of stakeholders in livestock development to respond to good and bad events in future, including major shocks such as another tsunami, a war and or disease pandemics.’

Click here to read Jerome Glenn’s paper, Global Scenarios and Implications for Constructing Future Livestock Scenarios, January 2006, 68 pages.

‘We are entering uncharted waters’, said FAO Henning Steinfeld, to develop a platform for creating a better understanding of livestock futures.’

ILRI’s director general, Carlos Seré, said ILRI and FAO share concerns about finding the best ways to position livestock in a dynamic world for the benefit of the poor.

The products of this meeting include a wealth of information embedded in four plausible ‘storylines’ that the participants constructed for the future. The participants adapted the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment scenarios for the livestock sector and used two axis: one defining a future environmentally reactive or proactive, the other defining a future globalized or fragmented. The scenarios the ILRI-FAO meeting participants developed ranged from a ‘Techno-Garden’, where technology is largely a good, benefiting many and bringing people together, to ‘Global Orchestration’, a world where consumers rule—but which consumers?, to an ‘Adaptive Mosaic’ future in which novel uses of IT connect livestock communities, to ‘Order from Strength; Weakness from Chaos’, a future in which where today’s international organizations are largely ineffective or have disappeared altogether, the world is fragmented and reactionary, and its every country for itself.

Summaries of the storylines will be produced by the end of March 2006. A longer report will be produced subsequently by ILRI and FAO. To receive a copy of the summaries or report, contact the meeting’s organizers, ILRI’s Ade Freeman or FAO’s Anni McLeod.

This livestock expert opinion is needed to feed into a major inter-governmental and consultative 3-year effort initiated by the World Bank called the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development. Involving 900 participants and 110 countries, the IAASTD is now collecting global and regional assessments of the state and needs of science and technology and is at the stage of preparing first drafts of results. Results of the ILRI-FAO meeting will also be used to inform annual program meetings of ILRI and the Animal Production and Health Division of FAO, where feedback from wider circles of livestock experts will be sought.

The aim of all this work, says ILRI livestock systems analyst Philip Thornton, is to ‘help build and drive a bandwagon rather than jumping on whatever bandwagon happens along. We need to be changing mindsets in a world where ten percent of the world’s population consumes ninety percent of the world’s resources. It is surely not impossible to have a more equitable world. We need to show people that livestock are a great development tool with which to do that.’

FAO Henning Steinfeld agrees. ‘The livestock sector must respond to the world as it is—and to how the sector is likely to be in the foreseeable future.’

If the world does not view livestock experts as long-term global visionaries, maybe it should take another look.

Healing wounds: Sick birds and starving cattle

Posted on February 8, 2006 by ILRIComms

Highly valued livestock waste away in the drought-hammered Horn of Africa.

Livestock in the thousands are dying daily in a drought ravaging Kenya and its neighbours in the Horn of Africa.Animals are in the news everywhere these days in the Horn of Africa. While disease control agents are on the look-out for sick or dead chickens, to spot what could be bird flu and prevent its spread, everyone else is fixed on a more daily sight: that of starving cattle wandering city streets in desperate search of grass. When too feeble to walk, the animals lay down to die.

Just five years ago, Kenyans were appalled by images from the UK of mass slaughter of hundreds of
thousands of cattle to stop the spread of foot-and-mouth, a disease endemic in Kenya and much of the developing world, where its appearance hardly raises a stir. Maasai pastoralists in particular thought the British crazy as well as cruel to kill so many and such valuable animals and offered to buy them from the ‘mad Englishmen’.

But the daily spectacle of cattle, sheep and goats dying across the parched countryside and in the city centres and leafy suburbs of towns and cities in the drought-hammered Horn may be even harder to bear. Livestock are valued highly here; they are the basis of livelihoods of most poor rural people, who, in the annual dry seasons, lose weight along with their farm animals. But these countries are too poor to deploy bullets for mercy killings. So animals die here like the poorest people do, slowly, painfully and in full view of everyone.

Debate on Africa's food crisis
Click here to read a debate 'Head-to-head: Africa's food crisis', from BBC News between Nicholas Crawford, an official from the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) and Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, a pan-Africanist and Director of Justice Africa, on what is causing Africa's deepening food crisis and what the solutions might be.

For more, please go to:
Bird flu threatens countries already in crisis
Avian flu and the developing world
Killing drought hits the Horn of Africa
Climate change threatens tropical maize production
Serious rain: Feature story
‘Healing Wounds’ in the Horn of Africa
Innovative livestock-water project launched

ILRI scientist Simon Graham wins international ‘Promising Young Scientist’ award

Posted on February 6, 2006 by ILRIComms

Young scientist receives prestigious award at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)'s annual general meeting.

Simon receives his awardSimon Graham, a veterinary immunologist at the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), was bestowed the ‘Promising Young Scientist Award’ by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) on 7 December 2005 by Ian Johnson, CGIAR Chairman and World Bank Vice President for Sustainable Development. This prestigious award was presented at the annual general meeting of the CGIAR, held in Marrakech, Morocco.

The award went to 33-year-old Graham for his research leading to the development of a sensitive and robust system for screening molecules that cause East Coast fever (ECF), a fatal disease of cattle in sub-Saharan Africa. Graham’s research, based at ILRI’s Nairobi laboratories, may also contribute to ongoing efforts to control tropical theileriosis, a cattle disease which puts 250 million cattle around the world at risk.

During his first post-doctoral position at the Centre for Tropical Veterinary Medicine, Edinburgh, UK, in 1998, he developed an improved rapid screening and production of vaccines against the protozoan parasite Theileria annulata, which is responsible for tropical theileriosis.

In 2000, Graham joined a large multidisciplinary research team at ILRI whose goal is to develop a ‘subunit’ Simon At Workvaccine against the related protozoan parasite Theileria parva. (Subunit vaccines are based on molecular bits of parasites rather than whole parasites.) T. parva causes East Coast fever (ECF), which costs 11 countries of eastern, central and southern Africa US$300 million a year. ECF puts 28 million cattle at risk and annually kills 1 million animals, 90 percent of which are kept by poor dairy farmers and herders. There is a high demand from poor livestock owners for a cheap, effective, safe and easy-to-deliver subunit vaccine against this devastating disease of cattle.

Simon Graham and his ILRI team are working in collaboration with several centres of excellence, including the veterinary pharmaceutical giant Merial and a leading human vaccine research group at the University of Oxford, UK, to evaluate the ability of these molecules to protect cattle against ECF. Initial results are encouraging—there appears to be a significant association between an animal’s induction of killer T-cell responses and its levels of protection against development of disease. Graham’s results have within a short space of time had a major impact in moving the research close to its ultimate goal of producing a vaccine that will sustainably control not only ECF but also tropical theileriosis. The vaccine candidates identified by Graham have been filed with the US Patent & Trademark Office and the research is now being prepared for publication in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Bird flu threatens countries already in crisis

Posted on February 6, 2006 by ILRIComms

The deadly H5N1 virus claims its first victim in Iraq while Africa girds itself for a battle against a new pandemic.

Live guinea fowl and eggs for sale in a market outside Kano, NigeriaAt the end of January has come news the world was dreading—a preliminary positive report from a US Navy medical laboratory in Cairo of the first death of a person from avian fly in Iraq, a country fighting an insurgency and perhaps in the early stages of civil war. The victim, a girl from Iraq’s Kurdistan region, died two weeks ago in a household that had sick birds; an uncle of hers died later with similar symptoms. With four confirmed deaths of people from avian flu in neighbouring Turkey, where the victims also became infected from sick birds, the fear is that this lethal virus could mutate into a form that can pass from human to human, rather than bird to human as it is normally transmitted now, provoking a flu epidemic that could kill millions of people in a short space of time.

While the fear of avian influenza is keeping some African farmers watchful for sick birds in their flocks, most smallholders are too poor and are facing too many other risks to pay much attention to this flu threat as of yet. African governments, however, are readying themselves. This January, 140 experts from 43 African countries met in Congo’s Brazzaville to draft a blueprint for tackling an outbreak in the world’s poorest continent, already battling AIDS and tuberculosis.

There are fears that avian influenza could spread to the continent via populations of migrating wild birds now residing in eastern Africa to escape the European winter, with the peak of migration being January to March. An outbreak of the lethal H5N1 virus anywhere in Africa’s Horn could spell disaster. More than three-quarters of the people in this region farm for a living and almost all households outside cities keep some chickens. Existing high rates of mortality among domestic birds here will make it hard to detect the virus. Unaware of the risks, villagers would tend to eat birds showing symptoms of the disease. And few African governments would have the resources to pay for culling bird populations and compensating farmers for their losses.

Avian influenza has not been detected in Kenya or any other African country yet. Kenya is close to completing a National Preparedness Plan after a series of weekly meetings by experts, including ILRI immunologist David Mwangi, which started late last year. Kenya has formed a National Avian Influenza Secretariat hosted by the Ministry of Health (MOH) and manned by that Ministry and the Directorate of Veterinary Services (DVS). Dr Mwangi participated in an Avian Influenza National Taskforce meeting in early January, where Kenya’s six-level response system was outlined. Kenya is now in Alert Phase I, which involves surveillance, laboratory support, infection control measures, case management, preparedness and communication and education. A Cabinet paper has been submitted to request funds from the Kenyan Government for this Task Force and donor funds are being sought.

Activities are being conducted now using the limited budgets of the MOH, DVS, Kenyan Museums (whose ornithologists are helping to check wild bird populations for diseased or dead birds), and an office of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), whose laboratories at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) include a Biosafety Level-3 Laboratory, the only kind in the country capable of carrying out diagnosis of avian influenza in conjunction with a CDC laboratory in Egypt. Kenya’s frontline national laboratories, KEMRI and DVS, have joined hands in this fight with the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) and ILRI to form sub-committees responsible for various work. ILRI is represented on the coordination and resource mobilization team; the surveillance and monitoring team, which are exploiting ILRI’s expertise in epidemiology and geographic information systems; and laboratory support, particularly diagnosis and DNA sequencing and database work.

To read more about ILRI and Kenya plans and activities on this task force, read ‘Bird flu threat still hovers over Kenya’ in the Sunday Nation, 15 January 2005.

The good news is that so far the bird flu virus has remained hard for people to catch. Most human cases acquired their infection during the home slaughtering and subsequent handling (defeathering and eviscerating) of diseased or dead birds before cooking them. The bad news is that in Africa as in Asia, birds are often marketed live, with home slaughtering common, increasing the risk of human infections in areas with outbreaks in poultry. Those buying poultry meat, however, are in no danger because chickens and other poultry are safe to eat if cooked properly.

ILRI agrees with other international organizations that key elements in helping developing countries cope with avian flu outbreaks among animals is strengthening surveillance systems and veterinary laboratories and services, improving people’s access to veterinary services, and providing proper compensation to poultry farmers and marketers for culled birds. World Bank Vice President Jim Adams says that, ‘Experience shows if you get the animal side right, one substantially reduces the risk of a human pandemic.’

With the continuing spread of avian flu beyond its stronghold in Asia, it is clear that combating the disease requires a long-term, internationally coordinated and well-funded effort. That’s why it is good news that donor and international health organizations meeting in Beijing January 17 and 18 pledged US$1.9 billion over the next 3 years to fight bird flu. About $1 billion will be disbursed as grants, the rest as loans. The donors of this massive new program—which include the European Union, United States and World Bank—have set up an Avian Influenza Multidonor Financing Framework to coordinate it.

Read a CGIAR news release and briefing on how the threat of avian flu impacts the developing world.

New outbreak of fatal Rift Valley fever in the Horn of Africa

Posted on January 26, 2006 by ILRIComms

Rift Valley fever is a viral disease of people and ruminant animals transmitted by mosquitoes. Epidemics frequently present as extensive abortion storms in small ruminants and cattle combined with heavy mortality in young animals. In people, the disease is most often a febrile illness without serious consequences. In a low percentage of human cases (about 1% or less), hemorrhagic complications can arise. Blindness also occasionally results. 118 deaths have been confirmed since the outbreak in November 2006 in the North-eastern province and coastal region of Kenya.

The disease is transmitted by the bite of infected mosquitoes or heavy exposure to aerosols in situations such as the slaughtering of infected animals. Outbreaks of the disease are associated with changes in local water resource management or periods of heavy rainfall. Examples have been the construction of new dams or El Nino rain events such as the one in East Africa in 1997-98 when there was a major outbreak of Rift Valley fever in Kenya and Somalia. The virus has been shown to over-winter in infected mosquito eggs. At the onset of the rains, infected mosquitoes transmit the disease to suitable amplifying hosts such as small ruminants. If vector densities are sufficiently high due to favourable environmental conditions, this starts a cascade-like recrudescence of the virus in the host and vector populations, leading to an epidemic.

Severe human cases, although an infrequent outcome of infection, are often the event that triggers recognition that an epidemic is under way. There is need to develop early warning systems and to validate prevention and control strategies that can mitigate the evolution of outbreaks. Rift Valley fever causes serious economic losses in livestock particularly in cattle and sheep, although goats, camels, Asian water buffalo and wild antelopes may be vulnerable.

Key research questions

A number of important research questions related to Rift Valley fever and its impact remain unanswered and worthy of further research. These include the following:

•  What is the economic impact of an RVF outbreak, particularly in terms of distribution, livelihoods, international trade, public health, and other macro-level factors? How does the disease affect unrelated sectors (e.g., tourism)?
•  How has the disease broadly affected trade patterns in livestock products from the horn of Africa and what are potential future impacts? How can these be mitigated?
•  How effective are current vaccines in their ability to prevent disease and how frequent are side effects? There are two types of vaccines currently in use, both of which have serious disadvantages. For human use, a ‘killed vaccine’consists of formalin-inactivated virus for restricted use.   It requires several doses and annual revaccination. It is not approved for general distribution and is used only for laboratory workers and other specialized groups. A live, attenuated vaccine is approved for use in livestock. It induces a solid, life-long immunity but may cause abortions if administered to pregnant animals.
•  What is the epidemiological impact and cost-effectiveness of alternative types of vaccination and movement control strategies? How can these tools be best used in the face of outbreaks like the one we are experiencing now?
•  Can diagnostic tests for the disease be improved to make them more ‘user-friendly’ for field workers and remote laboratories? Is it possible to develop good diagnostic tests to distinguish between active and past infections, and to distinguish previously exposed animals from vaccinated animals?
•  How can we enhance decision-making and promote the application of risk-based standards to ensure safe international trade of livestock products and scientifically sound trade restrictions?

The Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is actively seeking to become engaged in two areas.

In diagnostics, ILRI recently held discussions with the Kenya’s Department of Veterinary Services and South Africa’s Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute (OVI). OVI have developed a field-based test to diagnose RVF infection in cattle. This test requires only the application of a small blood sample to the device with a result obtained in about three minutes. Such a test has advantages over a laboratory-based test, in terms of speed of diagnosis and no need for electricity or other equipment. Although the test has profed successful in the laboratory, it has yet to undergo extensive testing in the field to ensure that it is sufficiently accurate. It is envisaged that ILRI will be involved in this testing, using samples from the current outbreak.

On another front, ILRI is pursuing the possibility of working with a Walter Reed Project (WRP) and the US-based Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to support their ongoing efforts to understand and control this present outbreak of Rift Valley Fever. Internal discussions within ILRI highlight three key areas in which ILRI could contribute in this process:

• Sensitise key stakeholders, particularly in government of the epidemiological and economic magnitude and impact of the current outbreak in Kenya.
• Initiate a process to identify appropriate veterinary control strategies to reduce both animal and human incidence of the disease
• Take advantage of the current situation to collect key epidemiological and economic data to guide further research and improve risk mitigation tools

ILRI is in discussions with the WRP-CDC teams to define roles specific for ILRI in the areas of assessing the socio-economic impacts of the disease, participatory epidemiology and surveillance, and the interface between livestock and public health. ILRI aims to help WRP-CDC in their short-run emergency response efforts as well as to use this current outbreak to help design decision-support tools to better manage future occurrences of Rift Valley Fever.

Avian flu and the developing world

Posted on November 29, 2005 by ILRIComms

A CGIAR news release and brief on how bird flu impacts the poor and fair ways of managing the threat.

CGIAR News Release: December 8^th 2005

CGIAR Brief: November 24^th 2005

ILRI and partners launch project to increase livestock water productivity in the Nile Basin

Posted on September 5, 2005 by ILRIComms

ILRI and partners launch an innovative livestock-water project at a workshop in Kampala, Uganda.

ILRI and partners launched an innovative livestock-water project at a workshop, which ran from 5 – 9 September. Participants identified technological, policy and behavioral changes that would allow livestock to become effective and productive users of the scarce water resources of the Nile Basin.

CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) Brochure

The Nile waters sustain life for about 200 million people, many of whom are desperately poor, from ten African countries. Water shortages already constrain food production in much of the Basin.

CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) News Release 1 September 2005

Livestock have been overlooked in water management programs. But the amount of water depleted by livestock in the Basin appears to be at least as great as that used to produce human food. (Production of livestock feed requires 50 to 100 times more water than animals drink.) A rising demand for livestock foods in these countries is placing even greater demand on water resources.

Uganda's State Minister for Animal Industry, Ms. Mary Mugyenyi, opened the workshop, ‘Nile Basin Water Productivity: Developing a Shared Vision for Livestock Production’, which was also attended by Dr. Carlos Seré, ILRI’s Director General.

For news items on the workshop and extracts from Carlos Seré's speech, click on the following links:

Monitor (Uganda) and All Africa Wire Service
People's Daily (China)
Sudan Tribune
Xinhua (China)

Numbers of malnourished children in Africa predicted to grow

Posted on August 15, 2005 by ILRIComms

New study is 'reality check' for forthcoming World Summit +5 The number of malnourished children in Niger and other African countries will grow if neglect of agricultural research and development continues, a policy institute report warns. Innovative agricultural practices are needed. The number of hungry children in Africa will grow by 3.3. million, from 38.6 million to 41.9 million by 2025, according to a new report from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). IFPRI and the International Livestock Research Institute belong to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which works around the world to reduce hunger, poverty and environmental degradation. The new IFPRI report cites low investment in agriculture as one of the reasons for its predicted rising numbers of malnourished children. The report argues that investment in agriculture can strengthen food security and reduce child malnutrition significantly by generating innovative agricultural practices in these countries, where more than three-quarters of the population make their living from the land. ILRI concurs with IFPRI on the need for greater investment in research to improve agriculture and agricultural policies in Africa and stresses that a focus on livestock is particularly urgent. The economies of the four dryland countries the report cites as in most danger – Burkina Faso, Niger, Somalia and Sudan – are based on livestock. Research-based innovations, such as new varieties of cowpea that feed people, livestock and soils, are refining the integration of mixed crop-and-livestock production in these countries to produce more food on less land with fewer resources. The IFPRI report, coming in the wake of a severe food crisis in Niger and its neighbouring West African states, provides a reality check for the 2005 Millennium+5 Summit to be held in New York City on 14 September 2005. The report estimates that Africa needs at least $303 billion in new investment to halve hunger on the continent by 2015, one of eight Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations.

ILRI news

Better lives through livestock

Category Archives: Africa