Thousands of Kenyans are being wrongly diagnosed and treated for the milk linked disease brucellosis, reveals a new study. Now researchers at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri) and six international institutions, want the responsible test withdrawn from public hospitals. Continue reading
Tag Archives: University of Liverpool
Kenya’s leading role in ‘One Health’ strategies controlling diseases transmitted between animals and people
‘Prof Eric Fèvre, a researcher of veterinary infectious diseases at the Institute of Infection and Global Health at the University of Liverpool and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Nairobi told the Business Daily the close interaction between people and animals worsened the situation. Continue reading
African camels could hold a key to controlling the spread of the MERS virus
African camels could hold important clues to controlling the potential spread of a respiratory disease transmitted by the animals. For many years African camels have lived with the disease and the risk of it spreading to humans is still low. But more research is necessary to understand the disease better. This is even more important given the confirmation that the chains of transmission of the human Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infection originated from contact with camels. Continue reading
Slum farming and superbugs—An ‘Urban Zoo’ science project tracks bacterial routes in complex environments
The Urban Zoo project is visiting 99 households across Nairobi, rich and poor, with livestock and without. They’re taking samples from people, their animals, and whatever wildlife they can find nearby (and catch): storks, mice, bats, et cetera. They’re sampling the ground around homes, yards and livestock pens with white paper booties. ‘The aim, says University of Liverpool veterinarian Judy Bettridge, is “to try and understand on a small scale how those bacteria are shared” among each household’s people, livestock and environment. “And then when we scale it up, are the bacteria here being shared with the household that’s 50 meters over there? Or 100 meters over there? So, how far can they actually spread?” . . . Continue reading
All things zoonotic: An ‘Urban Zoo’ research project tracks livestock-based pathogen flows in and around Nairobi
An Urban Zoo research project in Kenya (more formally called ‘Epidemiology, Ecology and Socio‐Economics of Disease Emergence in Nairobi’) is tracking pathogen flows in and around Kenya’s capital city. Continue reading
Driven by technology, (finally) embracing diversity: A geneticist’s views on the evolution of biotech research at ILRI
For the November 2011 ‘liveSTOCK Exchange’ event at ILRI, Steve Kemp, a livestock molecular geneticist, reflects on the evolution of ILRI’s research agenda and the role of biotechnology research in that agenda . . . Steve Kemp first came to the Nairobi campus of the International Livestock research Institute (ILRI) in 1985 when it was … Continue reading
Livestock genes identified to unlock protection from animal plagues
West Africa’s ancient (humpless) N’Dama cattle (white) are genetically resistant to the disease trypanosomosis while East Africa’s Improved Boran (humped) cattle are susceptible to this tsetse-transmitted disease (photo credit ILRI/Elsworth). Xinhuanet, the Chinese Xinhua News Agency online service, reports on an international research team that used a new combination of approaches to find two genes … Continue reading
An African cattle disease, disease-resistant cow and disease control solution
The tsetse fly, which spreads the livestock disease trypanosomosis (photo credit: ILRI/Elsworth). Aid Netherlands has picked up news of a paper published last month in a leading scientific journal about a breakthrough in determining the genes responsible for controlling a tsetse fly-transmitted disease of livestock that has devastated Africa, and held back farming on the … Continue reading
‘New science’ is ‘networked science’: The data-crunching workflows and pipelines behind a recent gene discovery
The single-celled parasite Trypanosoma brucei (appearing in blue), which causes sleeping sickness in humans and trypanosomiasis in livestock, amongst the red blood cells of its mammalian host (photo credit: Parasite Museum website). Having been domesticated in Africa some 8,000 or more years ago, the N’Dama, the most ancient of African cattle breeds, has had time to … Continue reading
ILRI to build climate model to predict disease outbreaks
The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), a member of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), has received a $4.4 million award for research to build a climate model that can predict outbreaks of infectious disease in Africa. ILRI will work with 11 partners and researchers to integrate data from climate modeling and disease … Continue reading