ILRI contributes chapters in new book on One Health approach to sanitation and institutional research

Hung Nguyen-Viet and Delia Grace, researchers with the Food Safety and Zoonoses program of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), are among several chapter authors of a new book “One Health: The Theory and Practice of Integrated Health Approaches” published by CABI in March 2015.

ILRI Asia

Researchers at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) are among the authors of a new book on One Health: The theory and practice of integrated health approaches published by CABI in March 2015.

ILRI’s Hung Nguyen and Delia Grace are among the contributors to this book

Hung Nguyen, a scientist with ILRI’s Food Safety and Zoonoses (FSZ) who is also a joint appointee of Hanoi School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (TPH), and Delia Grace, program leader of FSZ at ILRI, have co-written, with colleagues from research institutes in Vietnam and Switzerland, chapters on ‘One Health perspective for integrated human and animal sanitation and nutrient recycling’ and ‘Institutional research capacity development for integrated approaches in developing countries: An example from Vietnam’.

The publication, which emphasizes the role of One Health approaches in sanitation and capacity development in Vietnam, says One Health adds ‘value…

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One size does not fit all: Different food safety solutions needed for different contexts

Rinsing fresh fish in Accra, Ghana. Food safety systems need to be tailored to fit the contexts of different countries (photo credit: ILRI/Kennedy Bomfeh).

 

Every year, The Chicago Council convenes the Global Food Security Symposium to discuss the progress of the United States government and the international community on addressing global food and nutrition security. This year’s symposium, scheduled for 16 April in Washington DC, will address food systems for improved health.

In the 10-week period leading up the 2015 Global Food Security Symposium, the Chicago Council ran an online campaign, Healthy Food for a Healthy World, with one blog post being published each week to create awareness on the role of agriculture in improving global health and nutrition.

John McDermott, director of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health, and Delia Grace, leader of the Food Safety and Zoonoses program of the International Livestock Research Institute, contributed to the awareness campaign through a guest commentary titled Healthy Foods Must Be Nutritious, Safe and Fair.

In their commentary, they argue that to provide nutritious, safe and fair food to all, food safety systems must be tailored for different national and sub-national contexts.

“In an increasingly globalized world, there are dramatic differences in food systems. Policymakers and the public often assume that one universal system should apply everywhere. But what is good for the rich may be bad for the poor and vice versa.”

They also put forward three key lessons for adapting food safety systems, namely, aligning incentives with policy objectives, adopting risk-based approaches to food safety and developing capacity in food safety governance and practice.

To take part in the online discussions, follow @GlobalAgDev on Twitter, join the discussions using #GlobalAg or tune in to the live stream of the event on 16 April.

 

Why gender matters for food safety

The following is an excerpted version of a blog post originally published on the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) website.

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Some of the foods that would most enhance nutrition in diets in the developing world are also the riskiest in terms of food safety. Numerous health risks exist along the value chain for livestock and fish products, from production to consumption. In this post, Sophie Theis (Research Analyst, Poverty, Health, Nutrition Division, International Food Policy Research Institute) and Delia Grace (Program Manager, International Livestock Research Institute) relate findings from a recent A4NH/International Livestock Research Institute analysis of 20 livestock and fish value chains in Africa and Asia that reveal how gender differences in value chain participation influence risk exposure.

The results from the participatory risk assessment of these value chains are published in Grace et al. (2010) and a paper analyzing the gendered dimensions of risk is underway by Delia Grace, Sophie Theis, Kristina Roesel, Erastus Kang’ethe and Bassirou Bonfoh.

Selling milk in Ethiopia (photo credit: ILRI).

In rural Mali, a Fulani herder finishes milking a cow and hoists the calabash to his head, the milk sloshing gently in the vessel as he carefully carries the milk to Mariam, the woman he works for. By custom, Mariam has never milked a cow, but once the milk is in her domain, she is in charge of its business and use. Today she decides to keep this calabash for the family, since she has been able to sell milk at a favorable price often in the past week. She sets most aside to naturally sour, which will preserve it in the absence of refrigeration; the fermentation gives a sharp taste that consumers find thirst quenching in the hot season.

In the outskirts of Nairobi, Faith works the udders of her dairy cow. A male relative she has hired to help with the milking approaches with another pail of milk. She accepts it absentmindedly; she is already estimating the prices she will get selling the milk to neighbors and the local milk bar and considering whether she should invest the revenues in hiring another person.

In rural Mali, periurban Kenya, and many other parts of Africa, women play important and varied roles in livestock and fish value chains. The milk that Mariam and Faith helped to produce goes both to their families and to the market; it is also valued as gifts and in Mali as a sacrifice that brings blessing and protection against evil.

The decisions that Mariam and Faith make have bearings on many people’s nutrition: the quantity of milk that they keep for their household, how they apportion milk amongst household members, the use of the income from milk that they sell, and – less often acknowledged, but critical – the extent to which they effectively manage food safety risk, preventing contamination of the milk.

Many of the most nutritious foods, including animal source foods, are amongst the riskiest in terms of pathogen transmission. Meat, milk, fish and eggs provide plenty of nutrients for pathogenic organisms and can also carry infections from animals that harbor them to people. Food-borne disease persists as a major public health problem in Africa and Asia, where the majority of these foods are produced by smallholders, marketed through the informal sector, and sold in wet markets.

Food safety in these products is a major concern, as informal markets are important sources of food for the poor and tend to provide food that is more accessible, affordable, and compatible with local preferences for certain varieties of food and quantities than supermarkets.

Women like Mariam and Faith manage risk as they interact with informal markets by selling and buying food for their households. Informal value chains are complex, shaped by a number of actors. While risk management training interventions tend to focus on the owners of livestock or on actors only in one node of the value chain (e.g. butchers), risk management relies on all the actors along the value chain, from production, aggregation, processing, retail, and consumption. Many of these actors are women, and attention to local norms in the division of labor is critical for targeting food safety assessments and interventions.

Read the complete blog post on the A4NH website

 

Video highlights the lessons from a One Health approach in responding to foot-and-mouth disease in Japan

In April 2010, Miyazaki prefecture in Southwest Japan experienced an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, one of the most contagious animal diseases. Although the outbreak was successfully contained in just four months, by July 2010 there were 292 cases and 300,000 cows and pigs had been slaughtered. This resulted in an economic loss of about 2 billion US dollars.

In addition to the economic impact of the epidemic, the mental and psychosocial well-being of individuals and the community at large was also affected. For example, the sudden death of large numbers of animals caused considerable mental stress among farmers as well as the veterinarians and municipal government teams involved in the slaughter and disposal of infected cattle and pigs.

Restrictions on movement were imposed as part of efforts to prevent the disease from spreading; this led to stress-related symptoms among some residents, particularly the elderly. In addition, many farmers experienced depression and anxiety about the future following the loss of their livelihoods.

Recognizing the multiple impacts of the disease epidemic, a coordinated multisectoral approach was adopted, under the One Health concept, to tackle the disease as well as manage the mental health and psychological well-being of the residents of Miyazaki.

In a video titled Responding to an animal disease epidemic: Lessons from Miyazaki, various stakeholders who were involved in responding to the epidemic reflect on the usefulness of a One Health approach in helping to successfully respond to and overcome the challenges of the disease outbreak.

Featured in the video is Kohei Makita, an associate professor of veterinary epidemiology at Rakuno Gakuen University who is on a joint appointment at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). Makita and colleagues had earlier published work on the collaborative response of veterinary and psychiatry experts to the 2010 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak.

The video was produced by the World Bank Tokyo Development Learning Center, the United Nations University International Institute for Global Health, the National Center for Neurology and Psychiatry, Japan and Rakuno Gakuen University.

 

BecA-ILRI Hub hosts aflatoxin research platform towards safe food and feed in Africa

Aflatoxin-contaminated groundnut kernels from Mozambique (photo credit: IITA).

Among the many research projects carried out by the Food Safety and Zoonoses program of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is one that aims to reduce the risk of mycotoxins in the feed-dairy value chain in Kenya so as to improve food safety and safeguard the health of consumers of maize and dairy products.

The project is developing cost-effective and incentive-based mycotoxin control strategies and solutions for use by poor farmers and other actors within the feed-dairy chain.

Mycotoxins are poisonous metabolites produced by various species of moulds. Aflatoxins are cancer-causing mycotoxins produced by the mould Aspergillus flavus.

Aspergillus can grow in a wide range of foods and feed and thrives under favourable growth conditions of high temperature and moisture content.

The main activities of the project are:

• risk assessment of the Kenyan feed-dairy chain to identify the best control options and provide risk managers with information for decision-making
• assessment of the economic costs of aflatoxins in Kenya’s dairy value chain and examination of the cost effectiveness of mitigation strategies
• investigation of technologies and strategies to reduce mycotoxins risk in the feed-dairy chain
• impact assessment of a package of post-harvest strategies for reducing aflatoxins in maize
• dissemination of evidence and building capacity of local researchers and postgraduate students through participation in designing surveys, fieldwork and data analysis

The project also applies participatory methods to develop and test strategies to mitigate the risk of mycotoxins in the feed-dairy chain.

These participatory methods engage farmers in action research on their fields so they can learn and adopt new technologies and disseminate the knowledge to other farmers.

The project is hosted in the aflatoxin research platform of the Biosciences eastern and central Africa (BecA) Hub at ILRI’s headquarters in Nairobi. The platform was set up to provide African scientists and their research partners access to state-of-the-art facilities for nutritional and aflatoxin analysis.

The February 2015 issue of the Aflatoxin Partnership Newsletter, published by the Partnership for Aflatoxin Control in Africa, highlights the aflatoxin platform in an article by Jagger Harvey, a senior scientist at the BecA-ILRI Hub.

Since its establishment in 2011, the platform has hosted work of more than 60 researchers from seven African countries, Australia, Europe and North America,” writes Harvey.

“Collectively, the community around the laboratory has made initial assessments of aflatoxin contamination in a number of countries, conducted the first inoculated field trials in the region to identify maize varieties less susceptible to aflatoxin accumulation, developed models estimating aflatoxin risk at harvest and produced a range of other important findings and tools which are beginning to reach end users to help ensure safer food and feed for Africa”.

 

Uganda pig feed trials show benefits of local feed solutions

CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish

Research assistants chopping jackfruit (left) and weighing a feed trial pig (right) at Kamuzinda Farm, Uganda (photo credit: ILRI/Natalie Carter).

Pig production in Uganda is on the rise. The number of pigs in the country stood at 3.2 million in 2011 (based on a livestock census) from about 200,000 thirty years ago. A rise in the country’s population and incomes has triggered an upsurge in pork consumption. The per capita pork consumption of Uganda was 3.4 kg per person per annum in 2011, the highest in the East Africa region. Most of the pork consumed in the country is supplied by smallholder producers in over 1 million households, with women playing a central role in pig farming.

These figures, however, disguise challenges in the sector including diseases and parasites, unreliable markets, inadequate extension services and most importantly, poor quality and unavailability of pig feeds.

A 2013 value chain assessment conducted by the International…

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First global map of the rising use of antimicrobial drugs in farm animals published in PNAS

ILRI news

A woman in Uganda lets her chickens out to forage during the day (photo on Flickr by Jennifer Wilmore/Bread for the World).

This news article was developed by Tim Robinson with the help of Delia Grace, both of ILRI.

As reported last week in a scientific paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), Global trends in antimicrobial use in food animals, worldwide antimicrobial consumption is expected to rise by a staggering 67% between 2010 and 2030.

Five countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (the so-called ‘BRICS’)—will experience a growth of 99% in antibiotic consumption.

Use of such drugs has grown as livestock systems intensify around the world to meet a growing world demand for meat, milk and eggs, particularly in developing countries.

Widespread use of these drugs to prevent disease in farm animals or to promote their growth is a growing concern. Inappropriate…

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IFPRI 2014–2015 Global Food Policy Report features chapter on food safety management

A local pork vendor at the wet market sells her meat to two local women, Hung Yen province, Vietnam (photo credit: ILRI/Nguyen Ngoc Huyen).

 

The 2014–2015 Global Food Policy Report launched last week (18 March 2015) by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) examines the major food policy issues, developments and decisions around the world in 2014 and highlights challenges and opportunities for 2015.

An entire chapter has been dedicated to the subject of food safety which is a major global concern. The chapter titled Food safety: Reducing and managing food scares is authored by Delia Grace, leader of the Food Safety and Zoonoses program at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), and John McDermott, director of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture and Health (A4NH) led by IFPRI.

The chapter begins with a review of the high-profile foodborne disease events that took place in 2014 as well as progress that has been made around the world to improve the management of infectious disease through better information, technology and institutions.

The complexity and diversity of food safety concerns in three ‘worlds’ – developed economies, least developed economies and emerging economies – are examined next.

The authors define developed economies as those where foodborne diseases are of high concern but impose relatively small health burdens. Least developed economies are those where foodborne diseases, although prevalent, are not among the highest priorities of public health officials. Emerging economies are those where foodborne diseases are both highly prevalent and highly prioritized.

The chapter also discusses other health impacts of agriculture such as antimicrobial resistance, which is emerging as a serious threat to human health. This is especially so in emerging economies, where large amounts of antibiotics are manufactured and used with minimal regulation or reporting.

“There is increasing consensus that resistance to antimicrobials of human importance has been generated in animals and has since spread to humans,” the authors note.

The chapter concludes with suggestions for better management of food safety, noting that food safety is a global public good and, as such, requires international cooperation and investment in safer agricultural and food systems.

 

ILRI presents at inaugural regional conference on zoonotic diseases in eastern Africa

Farming scene in the highlands of Ethiopia (photo credit: ILRI/Apollo Habtamu).

 

Zoonotic diseases, or zoonoses, are diseases that can be passed from animals to people. Nearly two-thirds of emerging infectious diseases affecting people are zoonotic and about 60% of all human pathogens are zoonotic.

Zoonoses such as brucellosis, anthrax and rabies are endemic in eastern Africa and yet formally published research studies on zoonoses in the region are hard to come by; useful research findings remain tucked away in the libraries of universities and other research institutions in form of working papers and students’ theses: the so-called ‘grey literature’.

In order to bring to the fore the wealth of unpublished research on zoonoses from studies carried out in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda, the first-ever regional conference on zoonotic diseases in eastern Africa was held in Naivasha, Kenya on 9-12 March 2015.

The conference brought together academicians, researchers and graduate students from across Africa who presented on topics such as the One Health approach to disease prevention and control, the global health security agenda, the recent Ebola outbreak and its control, and control of rabies in East Africa.

Some 80 oral and poster presentations covered a wide range of aspects of research on zoonotic diseases including epidemiology, antimicrobial resistance, diagnosis, surveillance, outbreak investigations, disease modelling and foodborne zoonoses.

Bernard Bett, a veterinary epidemiologist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), gave a keynote presentation on behalf of the institute’s director general Jimmy Smith detailing how research by ILRI is contributing towards healthy people, animals and ecosystems.

Food insecurity remains a challenge for millions of people in the region. Animal-source foods can play a role in improving food and nutritional security, particularly in developing countries where demand for meat, milk and eggs is on the rise. Thus, food security is linked to the health of the livestock that produce these food products.

However, because of the threat of endemic and emerging zoonotic diseases, human health is influenced by animal health. Furthermore, changing patterns of land use, such as irrigation and intensified farming, can have an impact on the life cycles of vectors that spread diseases that affect both animals and people. Therefore, the impact of agriculture on ecosystem health also needs to be considered when tackling animal and human health challenges.

View the presentation “Healthy people, animals and ecosystems: The role of CGIAR research”
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#IWD2015: Why do we need a gender perspective in research to improve food safety in informal markets?

A woman milks one of her goats in Ségou District, Mali (photo credit: ILRI/Valentin Bognan Koné).

Almost two-thirds of the world’s 925 million poor livestock keepers are rural women, and women often predominate in urban agriculture. In Africa, most livestock products are sold in traditional or informal markets which offer livelihood opportunities as well as affordable, convenient and nutritious food to millions of people.

Women and men often play different roles in animal production and in the processing, sale and preparation of animal food products. Women are more often involved in keeping poultry and small ruminants while men tend to have greater involvement in rearing of cattle. Almost everywhere in rural Africa, women are responsible for preparing and cooking food for home consumption.

Animal slaughter is also often differentiated by gender, with women being responsible for killing poultry, typically inside the homestead, but most slaughter of larger animals outside the home being done by men.

Small-scale processing of animal food products is often carried out by women while more modern, industrialized operations, such as dairy cooperatives, are often dominated by men, at least in managerial and ownership roles.

Traditional markets are particularly important for women. For example, in most African countries, the majority of street food processors and vendors are women, while the majority of customers are men. As well as being one of the few livelihood strategies open to poor women, the street food sector is of great importance to the economy.

The different roles of women and men in the production and processing of animal foods predispose them to different benefits as well as risks.

For example, in West Africa where men dominate milk production, they are more at risk from zoonotic diseases associated with direct contact with cows during milking. On the other hand, in smallholder farms in Kenya where women are often in charge of milking, the situation is reversed.

In Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, where artisanal coastal fishing is a key livelihood activity, men are in charge of fishing but women handle the on-shore smoking and selling of the fish.

Because of these variations in the roles of men and women in the production, processing and sale of animal food products, it is necessary to adopt a gender perspective in food safety research aimed at reducing health risks and improving the safety of animal products sold in the informal sector.

A study by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and partners on the microbial quality and safety of meat in Bodija market in Ibadan, Nigeria revealed that gender and group membership had an influence on meat quality.

Women were found to have significantly better food safety practice than men, though there was no significant difference in their knowledge of and attitude towards food safety. The study also identified butchers’ associations as promising entry points for interventions to improve food safety.

Another study investigated the social and gender determinants of the risk of exposure to Cryptosporidium from urban dairying in Dagoretti, Nairobi, Kenya. Cryptosporidium is a microscopic parasite that causes the diarrhoeal disease cryptosporidiosis.

Women were found to have greater contact with raw milk and this increased their risk of exposure to cryptosporidiosis infection. However, there was no significant difference between men and women as regards knowledge on symptoms of cryptosporidiosis or other zoonotic diseases associated with dairy farming.

These two examples show how a gender perspective in food safety research can ensure:

• men’s and women’s differential exposure to agriculture-related risks are better understood, particularly as it relates to health outcomes
• women have increased capacity to manage risks and are more involved in the surveillance of risks
• women directly benefit from interventions designed to reduce agriculture-associated diseases, taking into account roles and responsibilities that may put them at increased risk of exposure

Read more in this ILRI research brief: Poverty and gender aspects of food safety in informal markets in sub-Saharan Africa.