Animal to human controlling diseases which affect poor people and their livestock

Animals belonging to poor people often suffer, like their owners, from ill health. Many of the diseases affecting livestock can be transmitted to humans. The best known and most feared of these ‘zoonotic’ diseases is rabies, and others include bovine tuberculosis, brucellosis, sleeping sickness and various tapeworms. These diseases are often difficult to diagnose, have high fatality rates and are easily confused with other more common ailments.

In Africa, brucellosis is often misdiagnosed as malaria, and sleeping sickness patients may be diagnosed as having AIDS. Research has provided evidence of the way these neglected diseases both target the poor and ensure that it is the isolated rural poor who suffer most from being incorrectly diagnosed and treated, thus often dying unnecessarily of a treatable condition.

Each year, sleeping sickness affects half a million Africans and kills 50000 people. The disease is caused by parasites transmitted by tsetse flies when they feed on the blood of people or animals. Research has shown the extent to which local cattle are now the main source of the acute form of sleeping sickness, which affects people in eastern Africa. By convincing policy-makers that epidemics of the disease in people can be stopped by treating animals against the disease, a dramatic reduction in the incidence of sleeping sickness in Uganda has occurred.

Milk is a vital component of nutrition for poor families, especially for children. People drinking unboiled milk are at risk from the presence of bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis, as well as from other bacteria. Researchers have worked on this issue with pastoralists and smallholder dairy farmers in Tanzania, by developing and promoting messages on the importance of milk hygiene and boiling, which have begun to change local practice.

For zoonotic diseases, controlling the disease in livestock is often the most efficient and cost-effective way of safeguarding human health. However, changing production systems need to be monitored. In urban areas, people are keeping more livestock and in many rural areas, the type and breed of livestock kept is changing rapidly. These trends bring new disease risks to livestock keepers and to people consuming livestock products.

Researchers and policy-makers should ensure that:

• carefully designed epidemiological studies both identify groups at risk and point to the best routes for controlling these diseases in people and their animals
• research works at different levels – from advanced diagnostics to testing and developing simple hygiene messages – and targets a range of stakeholders in order to be effective in promoting disease control
• responsibility for the control of zoonotic diseases is addressed as this is often passed back and forth between overstretched and under funded medical and veterinary services

DFID research has been instrumental in bringing these two groups together in new and effective disease control initiatives which have saved lives.

Professor Ian Maudlin
Manager, Animal Health Programme
Centre for Tropical Veterinary Medicine
University of Edinburgh
Easter Bush
Roslin
Midlothian EH25 9RG
UK
ahp@vet.ed.ac.uk

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