Aflatoxins: serious threat to food safety and food security, but is it related to livestock?

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 conditions of high temperature and moisture content.

Aflatoxin contamination can occur before crops are harvested when temperatures are high, during harvest if wet conditions occur and after harvest if there is insect damage to the stored crop or if moisture levels are high during storage and transportation.

Aflatoxins in contaminated animal feed not only result in reduced animal productivity, but can also end up in milk, meat and eggs, thus presenting a health risk to humans.

The poster below, prepared for the Tropentag 2014  conference, presents an overview of a research project led by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) aimed at measuring and mitigating the risk of aflatoxins in the feed-dairy chain in Kenya.

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Aflatoxins: serious threat to food safety and food security, but is it related to livestock?

This week, ILRI staff are participating in the Tropentag 2014 International Conference in Prague (17-19 September 2014). There is also a dedicated ILRI@40 side event on livestock-based options for sustainable food and nutritional security and healthy lives.  See all the posters.

 

ILRI researcher wins University of Queensland alumni award

Tarni Cooper with children from a livestock-keeping household in Morogoro, Tanzania (photo credit: ILRI/Tarni Cooper).

We are pleased to congratulate Tarni Cooper, a veterinary scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), on being named as one of five recipients of the 2014 Distinguished Young Alumni awards of the University of Queensland (UQ). The award will be presented at a ceremony scheduled for 2 October 2014.

The award recognises outstanding alumni aged 35 years or younger whose early accomplishments inspire and provide leadership to students and alumni. She was a UQ valedictorian in 2010 when she was awarded her Bachelor of Veterinary Science degree with honours and also won the Dr John Gibb Biosecurity Memorial Prize that year.

In 2013, Cooper worked with ILRI’s Food Safety and Zoonoses program as an Australian Youth Ambassador for Development and was part of a research team that worked in rural Tanzania on a project to assess the presence of a range of potential pathogens in smallholder dairy cattle. She studied the use of various communication approaches to obtain informed consent during research.

An enumerator uses a poster to obtain informed consent for research in Morogoro, Tanzania (photo credit: ILRI/Tarni Cooper).

Livestock keepers in Morogoro, Tanzania examine a poster used to obtain informed consent for research (photo credit: ILRI/Tarni Cooper).

Previously, she spent time in Vietnam during a five-year project, working with smallholder pig farmers and using participatory video as an innovative communication approach to help the farmers learn from each other and improve their pig production methods. Earlier this year she returned to Vietnam and used participatory photography to study the long-term impact of the film.

Cooper is currently collaborating with ILRI on a Vietnam-based project on livestock competitiveness and food safety, as well as serving on the Institutional Research Ethics Committee. Her next career goal is to undertake a PhD in communication for social change.

 

New studies on MERS coronavirus and camels in eastern Africa published

ILRI news

Part of a large camel herd in northern Kenya; on the outskirts of Marsabit and Moyale, the average distances to watering points run into dozens of kilometres (photo credit: Ann Weru/IRIN).

Written by Dan Klotz

Two new papers on MERS coronavirus and camels in Eastern Africa have been published in the science journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Summary points

• Studies find that camels in Egypt, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan have antibodies to the coronavirus that causes MERS.
• The first study indicates that young camels are at greater risk of harbouring the virus than older camels.
• We do not know if the infections in East African camels have led to, or could lead to, disease in people; this possibility should be investigated.
• We do not know if or how much the East African camel virus is related to the one infecting camels and people in the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt; this possibility…

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ACIAR newsletter highlights ILRI project on risk assessment for improved food safety in Vietnam

Hmong butchers selling pig meat from the indigenous Hmong black pig, recognizable from its thick layer of fat below the skin, Bac Ha, Lao Cai Province, Vietnam (photo credit: ILRI/Jo Cadilhon).

The July 2014 issue of Partners Magazine, the flagship publication of the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), features an article on an ACIAR-funded project led by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) that uses a risk assessment approach towards improving the safety of pig and pork value chains in Vietnam.

Hung Nguyen-Viet, an ILRI scientist and deputy director of the Center for Public Health and Ecosystem Research (CENPHER) at the Hanoi School of Public Health, is playing a lead role in the project which is working to strengthen local capacity on risk assessment for effective management of food safety along the entire value chain.

Read the article, Food safety from farm to fork

Read more about CENPHER in their new report, CENPHER five year report 2009–2014: From a research project to a research center

 

ILRI scientists present at international ecohealth conference

Typical mixed crop-livestock farming of western Kenya. The EcoHealth 2014 conference will discuss ecohealth research under the theme ‘Connections for health, ecosystems and society’ (photo credit: ILRI/Charlie Pye-Smith).

A group of scientists from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) will join hundreds of ecohealth researchers from all over the world for the fifth biennial conference of the International Association for Ecology and Health which begins today, 11 August 2014, in Montréal, Canada.

Jimmy Smith, director general of ILRI, gives a keynote address on 13 August and several ILRI scientists will give oral and poster presentations. Delia Grace and Johanna Lindahl from ILRI’s Food Safety and Zoonoses program will lead a special session on integrative approaches to disease modelling.

The four-day conference, dubbed EcoHealth 2014, is co-hosted by the Canadian Community of Practice in EcoHealth and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Well-Being, Health, Society and Environment of the Université du Québec at Montréal. The overall theme of the conference is ‘Connections for health, ecosystems and society’.

The three main sub-themes of the conference are:

• Drivers of change to health, ecosystems and society: Integrating understanding from global to local scales
• Innovations in theory, methods and practice
• Moving between research and action: Mobilizing knowledge to benefit health, ecosystems, and society

In addition to the keynote addresses and presentations during plenary, parallel and poster sessions, the conference will hold an international discussion forum on 12 August. The discussion forum is a combined webinar and face-to-face activity that will focus on the conference statement addressing ‘Ecohealth and Climate Change’.

The webinar will involve a panel of international discussants (offsite and onsite) who will address synergies, connections and next steps relevant to the conference statement and their work. Two webinar sessions are planned in order to optimize participation across time-zones.

Register for the webinar

Find out more about the conference

 

New ILRI report assesses risk of Ebola in Uganda’s pig value chain

Local breed sow and piglets on a farm in Masaka district, Uganda. A new research report assesses the risk of Ebola in the pig value chain in Uganda. (photo credit: ILRI/Eliza Smith).

Scientists from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) have published a report of a risk assessment to determine the threat of the deadly Ebola virus in the pig value chain in Uganda.

Uganda is currently witnessing a rise in demand for pork and this has led to increased pig production in the country, mostly under smallholder production systems.

These higher pig populations raised under free-range or tethering systems may create overlap of fruit bat habitats where the pigs scavenge for food, thereby presenting a possible risk of Ebola transmission as some bat species have been identified as reservoir hosts of the Ebola virus.

Uganda has experienced outbreaks of Ebola virus disease in the past. However, there are still many unanswered questions on the ecology and mode of transmission of the Ebola virus.

The risk assessment study, based on a systematic review of literature, identified possible routes of transmission of the Ebola virus if pigs are involved, for example, spread between wild and domestic pigs, direct contact between infected pigs and humans, and contact between pigs and fruit bats.

The study recommends more research on the possible role of pigs in Ebolavirus transmission, an area that is not well understood at the moment.

“The present data suggest that pigs may act as amplifying hosts, but likely not reservoir hosts. This suggests the conditions under which pigs become infected with Ebolavirus and the role they play in transmission may have many variables that will have to be elucidated,” the report states.

Further research is underway to investigate the possible role of domestic pigs in the ecology of Ebola virus in Uganda and understand the public health significance of the virus to the pig value chain in this country.

The work includes laboratory diagnostics from a large sample of blood from domestic pigs collected as part of the initial wider value chain disease assessment.

This will be accompanied by a risk mapping study using spatial epidemiology and key informant surveys as well as some participatory techniques with key stakeholders to better understand risk factors and to serve as a ‘ground-truthing’ exercise for the risk map.

It is hoped that this research will lead to further collaborations with other public health organizations and serve as a potential predictive tool in the event of future outbreaks of Ebola in Uganda.

Access the research report here

Citation
Atherstone C, Roesel K and Grace D. 2014. Ebola risk assessment in the pig value chain in Uganda. ILRI Research Report 34. Nairobi, Kenya: ILRI.

 

New livestock maps pinpoint ‘danger zones’ for possible spread of deadly H7N9 strain of bird flu

ILRI Clippings

Feeding poultry in Bangladesh (photo on Flickr by WorldFish).

A recent paper that maps the global distributions of the world’s major livestock species has already been used to advance understanding of where surveillance efforts should be targeted to prevent the possible spread of a lethal bird flu virus now circulating in poultry populations in China, where it has killed 62 people. The original mapping work, led by Tim Robinson, of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), and published at the end of May, was immediately put to practical use in locating large regions in South and Southeast Asia that would suit the new lethal virus. Ominously, unlike H5N1, a viral strain of bird flu that has killed millions of poultry and at least 359 humans since its first appearance in 1987, H7N9 does not cause severe illness in the chickens it infects, making it much more difficult to detect, and…

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ILRI scientists present at international conference on building resilience for food and nutrition security

Delia Grace presenting at a side session on ‘Food safety: Options for addressing a growing crisis’ at IFPRI’s 2020 Conference on ‘Building Resilience for Food and Nutrition Security’ (photo credit: ILRI/Susan MacMillan)

On 15-17 May 2014, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) held an international conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on building resilience for food and nutrition security, with over 700 participants in attendance including researchers, policymakers and decision-makers.

Scientists from the Food Safety and Zoonoses program of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) were among the many speakers who presented at parallel sessions and side events.

Delia Grace gave a presentation on food safety in informal markets during a side event on Food safety: Options for addressing a growing crisis. She also spoke on dealing with food safety, nutrition, and public health crises during one of the parallel sessions.

Hung Nguyen-Viet spoke on food-borne diseases and public health shocks in East Asia and the Pacific while Bernard Bett presented on managing impacts from infectious disease outbreaks in dryland areas of East Africa.

More ILRI reports from the conference

Visit the conference website for more information and to access more of the conference resources.

 

ILRI postdoctoral scientist awarded TWAS-DFG cooperation visit to Germany

Joseph Erume, a researcher at Makerere University, has been awarded a three-month cooperation visit to the Friedrich Loeffler Institute (FLI) in Jena, Germany starting June 2014.

Through this visit, he will continue his research work on seroprevalence and molecular characterization of Brucella suis in pigs in central Uganda which he started under the Safe Food, Fair Food and Smallholder Pig Value Chains Development projects.

Erume’s academic background in microbiology and swine health placed him in an excellent position to contribute to these projects during his research fellowship at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

His work was supported by the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) through an in-region postdoctoral fellowship by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

The cooperation visit will also provide the opportunity to discuss research collaboration with German scientists, possibly including some preliminary experiments, with the ultimate goal of developing longer-term collaboration through other DFG programs.

The cooperation visit program of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) provides postdoctoral researchers from sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa) with the opportunity to make a three-month cooperation visit to a research institute in Germany.

We congratulate Erume on the successful application for this prestigious award and the placement at FLI Institute of Bacterial Infections and Zoonoses which also hosts the World Organization for Animal Health and national reference laboratory for porcine brucellosis.

Erume’s application was supported by ILRI scientists Danilo Pezo, Delia Grace, Fred Unger and Kristina Roesel.

 

ILRI joint appointee scientist wins Queen’s University Marty memorial scholarship

ILRI joint appointee scientist Natalie Carter and the son of a smallholder pig farmer in Uganda (photo credit: ILRI/Natalie Carter).

We are pleased to congratulate Natalie Carter, a PhD student at the University of Guelph and joint appointee at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), who has been awarded the 2014 Queen’s University Marty Memorial Scholarship.

She beat 30 highly competitive candidates to win the scholarship that was awarded in recognition of her exemplary research on gender and global development.

In 2013, Carter joined an ILRI-led project on smallholder pig value chains development in Uganda. Her research is focused on appropriate feed options for smallholder pig farmers in Uganda, many of whom are women.

“I am really excited about the scholarship as it will help pay for my university tuition,” said Carter.

“It will also enable me to attend a summer training workshop of the Canadian community of practice in ecosystem approaches to health. The workshop will provide valuable training that I will apply in my research”.

The Marty Memorial Scholarship was established in memory of Dr Aletta Marty and her sister Sophie Marty, a distinguished graduate of Queen’s University. It is awarded annually by the Queen’s University Alumni Association to a woman graduate of Queen’s University for one year of study and research.