Europe Day 2015 celebrations feature aflatoxin research by Finland-funded FoodAfrica program

Harvested maize in Tete Province, Mozambique (photo credit: ILRI/Stevie Mann).

 

As part of celebrations in Nairobi last week to mark Europe Day 2015, the Finland-funded FoodAfrica program took part in an exhibition at the residence of the European Union Delegation to the Republic of Kenya where several project outputs were showcased.

FoodAfrica is a research and development program aimed at providing new knowledge and tools for researchers, decision-makers and farmers towards improved local food security. The program works in Benin, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal and Uganda.

Sara Ahlberg, a Finnish associate professional officer and PhD student attached to the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, presented a poster that highlighted research approaches by the FoodAfrica program to reduce the risk of mycotoxins in the feed-dairy value chain in Kenya, namely,

• Integrated risk and economic assessment of the Kenyan feed-dairy chain
• Investigation of technologies and strategies to reduce mycotoxin risk in the feed-dairy chain
• Impact assessment of a package of post-harvest strategies for reducing aflatoxins in maize

View the poster, FoodAfrica – Reducing risk of mycotoxins

 

Study explores effect of land use and biodiversity changes on risk of zoonoses in Tana River County, Kenya

Orma Boran cattle crossing a river in Kenya (photo credit: ILRI/Rosemary Dolan).

The Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium is a research program that works to understand the relationships between ecosystems, zoonotic diseases, health and wellbeing in order to inform effective public health interventions.

Under this program, multidisciplinary country teams are studying four zoonotic diseases: henipavirus infection in Ghana, Lassa fever in Sierra Leone, Rift Valley fever in Kenya and trypanosomiasis in Zambia and Zimbabwe. The focus is on how changes in biodiversity, land use and climate affect disease transmission.

The development of irrigation schemes is thought to influence pathogen transmission in people and animals in several ways. For example, masses of stagnant water and high humidity support the development of disease vectors like mosquitoes. In addition, irrigated areas are likely to have a higher density of animal hosts like chicken and small ruminants.

In order to investigate the influence of irrigation and changes in biodiversity on the distribution of zoonoses, a cross-sectional study was carried out in Tana River County, Kenya, home to the Hola Irrigation Scheme. The zoonoses of interest were Rift Valley fever, Q fever, brucellosis, West Nile virus, dengue fever and leptospirosis.

Irrigation causes a decline in biodiversity as wildlife habitats are cleared to make way for crop agriculture. However, the linkages between biodiversity and disease risk remain unclear. It was also found that areas with a rich diversity of hosts have higher prevalence of multiple zoonotic pathogens as compared to areas with lower host diversity.

The study also found that while irrigated areas are infested with multiple species of mosquitoes (including primary vectors of Rift Valley fever), their high population densities alone are not enough to sustain the transmission of pathogens; reservoir hosts (for example, birds for West Nile virus) or other persistence mechanisms are required.

These and other findings from the study were presented at the 49th annual scientific conference of the Kenya Veterinary Association which was held in April 2015.

View the presentation, Land use, biodiversity changes and the risk of zoonotic diseases: Findings from a cross-sectional study in Tana River County, Kenya

 

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

 

World Health Day 2015: Highlighting food safety research at ILRI

Testing milk in Kenya’s informal market (photo credit: ILRI/Dave Elsworth).

 

World Health Day is celebrated on 7 April every year to mark the anniversary of the founding of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1948. Each year, a theme is selected to highlight a priority area of public health. The theme for World Health Day 2015 is food safety, with the slogan “From farm to plate, make food safe”.

An estimated 2 million people die every year from contaminated food or drinking water. Over 200 diseases are caused by unsafe food containing harmful bacteria, parasites, viruses and chemical substances. New data on the harm caused by foodborne illnesses underscore the global threats posed by unsafe foods, and the need for coordinated, cross-border action across the entire food supply chain.

The Food Safety and Zoonoses program of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) carries out research on food safety in informal markets to support intensifying livestock production by building capacity for better management of the safety of animal food products.

As we celebrate this year’s World Health Day, we invite you to read some recent blog posts on food safety research by ILRI and partners:

• BecA-ILRI Hub hosts aflatoxin research platform towards safe food and feed in Africa
• IFPRI 2014–2015 Global Food Policy Report features chapter on food safety management
• Why do we need a gender perspective in research to improve food safety in informal markets?
• New book presents research findings on food safety in Africa’s traditional meat, milk and fish markets
• ILRI research on animal health and food safety featured at the 6th All Africa Conference on Animal Agriculture

 

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.

 

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…

View original post 1,048 more words

 

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”
.

 

New book presents research findings on food safety in Africa’s traditional meat, milk and fish markets

Animal products – meat, milk, eggs and fish – are vital components of the diets and livelihoods of people across sub-Saharan Africa. However, these nutritious food products are also the most risky. Most food-borne disease is caused by perishable foods: meat, milk, fish, eggs, fruits and vegetables.

Food borne-disease can be serious. In a minority of cases, it can cause epilepsy, paralysis, kidney failure and death. In addition, the global economic burden of food-borne disease is significant. Annually, food-borne disease is estimated to cost US$78 billion in the United States of America, US$14 billion in China and US$3 billion in Nigeria.

Over 80% of the meat, milk, eggs and fish produced in developing countries is sold in traditional or informal markets. These markets are accessible, sell affordable food and provide market access to small-scale farmers. However, informal markets often lack adequate refrigeration, inspection and control of food-borne disease.

For over a decade, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and partners have been conducting research on food safety in informal markets to support intensifying livestock production by building capacity for better management of the safety of animal food products.

A newly published book launched two weeks ago (27 Jan 2015) at ILRI’s Nairobi headquarters presents a review of food safety in informal markets and 25 case studies of the meat, milk and fish sectors in eight countries in East, West and southern Africa, as part of the Safe Food, Fair Food project.

A key finding from the book is that in low-income countries it is important to distinguish between the potential food-borne hazards (such as harmful bacteria, chemicals and toxins) and the actual risks they are likely to present to consumers.

For example, data from East Africa show that although the raw milk available from street vendors and traditional markets may contain many health hazards, the actual risks to consumers may be negligible due to the common practice of boiling milk before consuming it.

“Food safety policy should be guided by rigorous research to understand the ways food is produced and consumed in different societies so we can devise strategies that are most likely to reduce the risks, particularly to poor consumers,” said Kristina Roesel, coordinator of the Safe Food, Fair Food project.

“Improving food safety in informal markets will require policies that are guided by an understanding of producer and consumer behaviour, local diets and customs, and interventions that can reduce illness without imperilling food security or increasing poverty,” said Delia Grace, program leader for food safety at ILRI.

Download the book, Food Safety and Informal Markets: Animal Products in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Kristina Roesel and Delia Grace.