Bird maps developed for Uganda

Posted on April 4, 2006 by ILRIComms

ILRI and Uganda experts have just produced a series of poultry density maps for Uganda, which will provide information on potentially threatened areas in the event of bird flu reaching the country.

Africa is on red alert for bird flu, with five states – Egypt, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Burkina Faso- now having confirmed cases of the deadly H5N1 strain in poultry.

Uganda, located in eastern Africa, has an estimated population of 25.3 million and an annual population growth rate of 2.7%. Despite Uganda’s progress and concerted poverty reduction efforts, poverty is still widespread, with an estimated 38% of the population living below the national poverty line. The latest figures show the average life expectancy of a Ugandan is 43 years (47 years in 1990), infant mortality is 83 per 1000 live births, and under 5 mortality is 141 per 1000 children. The annual number of births is 1.3 million, but an estimated 184,000 children under 5 die each year.

(Data sources: World Bank; UNICEF.)

Agriculture is the most important sector of Uganda’s economy, contributing over 32% of GDP and employing over 80% of the work force. The poultry maps give a visual representation of poultry density in Uganda, including total poultry density, local chicken, exotic/cross-bred chicken, turkeys, ducks, guinea fowl and geese. The maps reveal that almost 50% of agricultural households keep local chicken, but only a tiny proportion (0.7%) keep exotic/cross-bred chicken. Most local chicken are reared in the eastern and northern regions. For households rearing local chicken, 80% had less than 10 birds.

The maps also show high densities of exotic chicken can be found around major urban centres like Kampala, Jinja, Entebbe, Masaka, Mpigi and Mbarara. In these densely populated areas, demand for chicken has outstripped supply of local chicken. Many are now rearing exotic chicken mainly for economic gain. Of the households that rear exotic chicken 56% have less than 10 birds, with the vast majority (80%) having less than 100 birds.

Uganda 2002:
Total Poultry Density

Uganda 2002:
Duck Density

Uganda 2002:
Local Chicken Density

Uganda 2002:
Exotic Chicken Density

Uganda 2002:
Geese Density

Uganda 2002:
Turkey Density

Uganda 2002:
Guinea Fowl Density

Uganda 2002:
Livestock Density Per Household

Uganda 2002:
Ownership of Welfare Assets

These maps complement poverty maps published earlier this year.
See Where are the Poor in Uganda?

For more information on bird flu, go to Livestock in the News

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.

Drought continues to hit East Africa hard

Posted on February 20, 2006 by ILRIComms

Marc Lacey of The New York Times reports on the drought and bad planning that are hurting East Africa's drylands.

‘Animals are dying in huge numbers, their rotting carcasses littering the landscape and devastating the local economy. Aid workers estimate that 70 percent of the 260,000 cows in Kenya's Wajir district, near the border with Somalia, have died. Goats and sheep also are dying. Even camels, known for their ability to endure the most rugged of conditions, are dropping in the sand.’

People and livestock continue to die of thirst in the drought ravaged northern part of Kenya, despite having water delivered to them twice a week. This is because the water is barely enough to cater for all the individual members of the communities living here. At 20 litres of water a week, this averages to about three glasses of water per person, per day, for drinking and all other household purposes.

Click here to read the full article.

Click here for more from ILRI on the drought in Africa.

ILRI wins two top awards

Posted on February 16, 2006 by ILRIComms

ILRI vaccine developers won an award for Outstanding Scientific Article. Another ILRI team conducting research on savannah ecosystems shared an award for their innovative collaboration with Maasai landowners in Kenya.

Scientific Recognition

Each year, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) recognizes the scientific contributions of the 15 agricultural research centres it supports through its Science Awards, presented at its Annual General Meeting (AGM), held each year in December.

At the CGIAR’s AGM held in Washington DC at the end of last year, scientists from ILRI and The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) picked up the award for ‘Outstanding Scientific Article’ for their paper, published in the top scientific journal Science, ‘Genome Sequence of Theileria parva: a Bovine Pathogen that Transforms Lymphocytes’. The team, led by Malcolm Gardner of TIGR, received a cash prize of US$10,000, which is being donated to fund travel for staff and students to attend conferences in this area.

The paper’s second author, ILRI scientist Richard Bishop, said: “We are delighted to receive this award. Our multi-partner collaboration and recent discoveries illustrate that African science is forging ahead – we are collaborating with world-class players and producing world-class science right here in Africa, for Africa.”

Pictured above from left to right: ILRI’s Director of Research, John McDermott, and TIGR scientist (and former ILRI staff member) Vish Nene, with the Award for ‘Outstanding Scientific Paper’. Looking on is ILRI’s Director General Carlos Seré and Bruce Scott, ILRI Director, Partnership and Communications.

Download TIGR/ILRI Press Release

Innovative Collaboration with Civil Society

The CGIAR also recognizes the contributions of innovative collaborations between CGIAR-supported centres and Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) through its ‘Innovation Marketplace Awards’. This year, 46 CSOs were invited to participate at the CGIAR Innovation Marketplace to showcase their collaborative work and share experiences.

ILRI’s collaboration with the Kitengela Ilparakuo Landowners Association (KILA) was one of four collaborations to win a Judges’ Award with a cash prize of US$30,000, to use for further collaborative work. ILRI has been collaborating with the Maasai of Kitengela Plains, located next to Nairobi National Park, in Kenya, since 2002. They have devised means to ensure that people, livestock and wildlife can live in harmony and have lobbied government to reduce fencing to allow the annual migration of wildlife though the Kitengela Plains, thus helping to prevent conflicts between wildlife and people and their livestock. Other collaborators of the program are Kenya Wildlife Service, Friends of Nairobi National Park, The Wildlife Foundation and Kajiado County Council.

The prize award was collected by ILRI’s CSO representative Ogeli Ole Makui and ILRI’s Mohammed Said. Makui said: “This award means so much to us. Our major challenge is to move forward and continue with the collaboration to help the community move forward. The Landowners Association will be using the prize money to fund further collaborative work.

Pictured above, from left to right: CGIAR Chair and Vice President of the World Bank Kathy Siena, the Program Officer of the Kitengela Land Lease Program, Ogeli Ole Makui and ILRI scientist Mohammed Said.

Download the award-winning poster

ILRI Awards

Dr Carlos Seré , ILRI’s Director General, said: “ILRI’s work is frequently recognized at the CGIAR’s annual awards. Each year the bar is raised and this year was no exception. Competition was tough with a very high standard of entries in all categories. We wish to extend our congratulations to the winners from our sister centres and are delighted that ILRI has won two of the top awards this year. This recognizes our commitment and contributions to both science and society.”

Pictured above from left: ILRI Directors Carlos Seré and Bruce Scott and the President of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz at the CGIAR exhibit booth at the AGM in December 2006 in Washington, DC.

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.

Killing drought hits the Horn of Africa

Posted on February 1, 2006 by ILRIComms

The worst drought in 22 years is ravaging Kenya and its neighbours, killing livestock and livestock livelihoods.

In what some are calling Kenya’s worst drought in 22 years, nomads are herding their livestock into areas normally off limits to cattle, sheep and goats, despite their great popularity in this country, where landless urban farmers, rural smallholders, and ministers of parliament alike keep ruminant animals. Desperate to save their animals and with no money to buy feed, pastoralists are illegally grazing their animals on the grasslands of some national parks and in the forests around Mt. Kenya, popular tourist destinations that generally deny access to livestock herders and their stock. At the same time, there are reports of elephants leaving their game sanctuaries to search for water and food near human settlements, destroying crops and killing at least two people.

In the cities, herdsmen are sleeping at night under trees with their animals. In the mornings, they lead their emaciated animals to wherever there is a bit of green: along roadsides, in the middle of roundabouts, at the entrance to the city’s racecourse, and even to the lawns of the presidential mansion, where herdsman appeared with about 60 cows on New Year’s Day. While presidential guards rebuffed the interlopers (who then walked their cattle further, to a park in the city centre), President Mwai Kibaki declared the crisis a national disaster, saying that food shortages would affect some 2.5 million Kenyans. Three weeks later, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (IRCS) reported that the countries of the Horn were in the grip of a famine, with 11 million people facing serious food shortages due to drought and conflicts. Food shortages are particularly severe in Somalia, Djibouti, southeastern Ethiopia and eastern Kenya. Livestock deaths and crop failures, says the IRCS report, have led to famine, with about 40 human deaths reported.

The drought is the result of successive seasons of failed rains. These several seasonal failures have left pastoralists living in northern Kenya and other remote areas with few survival strategies left to cope with the crisis. It is imperative that they are supported in keeping their core livestock assets alive through the drought. (Selling the starving animals is not an option: cattle that fetched 20,000 Kenya shillings [US$280] normally are now being sold for less than a quarter of that.)

Drought is just one cause of Africa’s current food crisis. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations cites drought as the main problem in just 12 of the 27 African countries needing urgent food assistance today. A new report from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which, like the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), is a Future Harvest Centre of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), outlines the other critical issues behind Africa’s current hunger. These include rural underinvestment, conflicts, AIDs, population growth and poor soils.

Click here to read the 31 January BBC article: Africa's hunger: A systemic crisis. For a copy of the report, visit IFPRI’s website: www.ifpri.org.

ILRI research in the Nile Basin, Ethiopia and Sudan

Posted on January 27, 2006 by ILRIComms

At a meeting of the CGIAR in Morocco last December, ILRI reported on community-focused research in Central and Western Asia and North Africa to improve agriculture, water, ruminant health and market opportunities for poor farmers and marketers.

Nile Basin Region

Improving Livestock Water Productivity in the Nile Basin

Sudan Region

Improving Small Ruminant Health and Market Opportunities for Smallholders in the Near East and North Africa

Ethiopia

Improving Agricultural Productivity and Market Success of Ethiopian Farmers

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.

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