Thanks to our donors, collaborators, talented team, and stakeholders in Tanzania, HALI has been able to develop several different projects and activities focusing on research, health, outreach, education, service delivery, and development. All of these activities are hard to keep track of on this blog, so we developed a new website to better highlight our activities, news, and events. Please check out our new site haliproject.org, and our new blog at haliproject.org/blog.
We will maintain this WordPress site as the HALI archives, our original home and project foundation.
Happy Holidays and best wishes in 2013 from the HALI team, and thanks to our supporters and readers! HALI has several great projects running into 2013 and quite a few upcoming publications to share, so be sure to visit us again in the new year.
Is this a human-animal interface? (Photo by Liz. Vanwormer)
What is a human-animal interface?
An interface is the common boundary, or the place where two things touch or meet. The human-animal interface is the place where humans and animals come into contact. This interface can be in your home where you interact with your pets, in your fields where you work with livestock, or in the forest where you may encounter wildlife. The intensity of interaction at this interface can vary greatly. If you live in a city, you may have very little intensity of interaction at the human-animal interface, whereas a hunter’s interaction can be intense.
Why is this important? Approximately 75% of emerging infectious diseases are of animal origin, so both the type of interaction and the intensity of that interaction has implications for disease transmission and human-animal health.
In the Ruaha ecosystem, pastoralist communities interact intimately with their herds, and in many places live close to conservation areas where they (and their herds) are exposed to wild animals. HALI is working with pastoralist communities in Ruaha to better understand the context of the pastoralist human-animal interface to improve both human and animal health.
We are very excited to announce the release of the HALI project’s Wildlife Health Handbook – Kitabu cha Afya Wanyamapori in Kiswahili. In 2010-2011 HALI worked with the USFWS Wildlife Without Borders program and Ruaha National Park on an education and outreach program to help park rangers and local game scouts of the MBOMIPA community led Wildlife Management Areas. Emanating from this series of participatory training programs for park staff, rangers, and game scouts, HALI developed an interactive handbook to serve as a first reference guide to Recognizing, Investigating, and Reporting Diseases of Concern for Wildlife Conservation and Human Health.
While the English version of the Handbook has been available since last summer, the Kiswahli version took a little more time as we planned the translation with our great friend David Ngoseck and HALI team member and Tanzania National Parks Veterinarian Dr. Alex, and then reworked the layout and design at the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center with our fabulous publications coordinator and graphic designer Alison Kent. The Kiswahili handbook brings this resource to life for our Central and East African stakeholders, and for the majority of game scouts, rangers, hunters, and other people involved in high-risk interactions with wildlife in the area. The handbook is also a great primer in medical/veterinary Kiswahili for any folks out there interested in working with wildlife, animals, and health issues with East African communities. Just download both our English and Kiswahili versions and work through the content and exercises.
Thanks again to all those who have been involved in this project, especially Deana Clifford, Andrea Kulkarni (our talented illustrator), David Ngoseck Mollel, Alex Epaphras Muse, Alison Kent, the USFWS Wildlife Without Borders Program, Tanzania National Parks (special thanks to Ruaha National Park and David Meing’ataki), the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center team, and of course my HALI colleagues in Tanzania.
No guys, I haven't seen any roosters today sorry. Wait, are we talking about birds or bats here, I'm really confused (Photo by Misty Richmond).
Trapping Roosters (otherwise known as roosting bats)
Today our PREDICT team held a call with the Chief Ecologist of the PREDICT team in Cameroon Matthew Lebreton. Matthew is an expert on bat capture and handling, with lots of experience doing disease surveillance work with bats from Australia to West Africa. While Harrison, Zika, and Muhiddin explained to Matthew some of the challenges they face capturing small insectivorous bats in the Ruaha ecosystem, Matthew replied “you guys are doing pretty well actually.” Small bats are difficult to capture. Plus, unlike in the forests of Cameroon and Gabon where researchers place capture nets called mist nets perpendicular to known bat flyways under a thick rainforest canopy, the Ruaha ecosystem is open-air. We all know firsthand from freeze tag that it’s easier to catch something in a confined area like an alley than in an open field.
To address this challenge, Harrison and Zika are trapping small bats (aka Roosters in HALI vernacular) in Ruaha by placing nets outside known roosting sites in the eaves of people’s homes (where the risk of bat-borne disease transmission is greatest), and at watering holes (like in the picture above) where bats and other animals may congregate together providing another interesting interface for disease transmission between bats and other wildlife and domestic animals like pastoralist herds and dogs. Matthew also suggested trying some trapping by hand (literally grabbing a bat with a heavily protected and gloved hand), and using another type of trap called a harp trap placed outside the roosting site.
Capturing small bats will continue to be difficult, especially since PREDICT’s bat surveillance is all new research for the Ruaha area. But who knows, maybe they’ll discover a new species! Muhiddin will be sharing some photos of the bat surveillance activities with us over the weekend, so when I receive them, I’ll post them to the HALI Facebook page.
The Livestock and Climate Change Change CRSP has just released a new HALI project Research Brief featuring results of research conducted in the first year of new CRSP activities in Ruaha, Tanzania as part of the Strengthening Tanzanian Livestock Health and Pastoral Livelihoods in a Changing Climate project. The brief, entitled “Pastoralist Access to Livestock Health Services: Implications for Climate Change-Driven Disease“ is available for download on the LCC CRSP website.
RB-07-2012 - Pastoralist Access to Livestock Health Services: Implications for Climate Change-Driven Disease
Ian Gardner, E. VanWormer, C.R. Gustafson, G. Paul, A. Makweta, J.A.K. Mazet, W.A. Miller, and R.Kazwala, HALI Project
Pastoralists and livestock populations in semi-arid grassland regions across the world are extremely vulnerable to climate change impacts on water, pasture, and disease dynamics. Disease, especially, can have devastating effects on livestock survival and marketability, threatening animal health and livelihoods. In order to address this growing problem, researchers working in the Ruaha region of Tanzania have been preforming capacity assessments of the livestock health services available to rural pastoralists.
With sad hearts and fond memories, HALI said goodbye to longtime project friend and colleague Ally Kitime this month. Ally was a part of HALI from the beginning, as the Sokoine University of Agriculture Faculty of Veterinary Medicine’s Laboratory Manager and Principle Technician. His kind smile, gentle demeanor, and dedication to his work is best exemplified by the publications he enabled and those he helped graduate and train. Many of us on the HALI team, Harrison Sadiki, Deana Clifford, Woutrina Miller, Khadijah Said, Julius John, Enos Kamani, Annette Kitambi, Annette Roug, Liz VanWormer, and myself all learned from Ally, from his vast experience in the realm of laboratory diagnostics, and from his demeanor: no matter how stressful the project or intense the meeting there was always time for a smile, for a habari, and to remember that relationships and family trump an agenda.
I first met Ally when working on my masters project in Tanzania as a UC Davis student in 2008. I will always find it ironic that my first laboratory experience was in Africa, and my first laboratory instructor Ally with help from friend and then HALI coordinator Deana Clifford. Ally, Deana, and I were working with a young Bachelor’s honor student Enos Kamani on a project to determine the prevalence of Cryptosporidium and Giardia in calves in pastoralist herds. Enos and I were training on the diagnostic technique, using an immuno-fluorescence microscope. From that time, to the present, when my relationship with Ally was no longer face to face, but voice to voice on weekly Skype meetings with the PREDICT project, Ally was a trusted and respected colleague, a happy man in a white coat whose legacy lives on in the work of the students and collaborators he touched and in the lives of the family he leaves behind. God bless you Ally, safari njema bwana…
We will preserve this post on the HALI blog as a remembrance page for Ally. Please click this link to visit the Tribute Page. Comments and memories of your experiences with Ally are most welcome, so feel free to add them as comments. If you would like to share pictures, please contact me (djwolk@gmail.com), and I will incorporated them into this post as a slideshow.
A herder walks with sheep and goats to water. (Photo by Misty Richmond)
Walking for water (Part 2)…
Last week we posted a photo of two Maasai women carrying buckets of water from the local creek to their homes for domestic use. This week we present Part 2 of the water saga. In the Ruaha area, as is the case with most pastoralist communities, herders escort their animals from their bomas (livestock pens) to water on a daily basis, sometimes several times per day depending on the season, distance to water and the heat. As water sources dwindle due to climatic variability, these walks grow longer and more strenuous for the animals and their herders. On many occasions, we have accompanied pastoralists on these walks, only to find the creeks dry and water quality so low that we had to dig into the creek beds to allow water to bubble to the surface for the animals. In the dry season especially, wildlife, livestock and people congregate at these limited watering holes, which become ideal interfaces for exposure to zoonotic and waterborne pathogens. HALI’s disease education program has been working with pastoralist communities to better understand the health risks associated with sharing water sources with animals, and have been very successful in increasing adoption rates of water treatment practices like boiling, UV radiation, and filtration.
Check out some of our research briefs on water quality and use in the Ruaha area for more information.
You can click on this link to read more about the video: why even water in containers at home, like the buckets carried by the Maasai women, may still be at risk for contamination with water-borne and zoonotic diseases.
It is almost that time again, time to bring attention to the several million people who die from tuberculosis each year, and the subsequent impact on their families and community. World Tuberculosis Day is March 24th, commemorating the day that Robert Koch announced the discovery of the cause of tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. At times like these, I’m never sure if advocacy groups intend for the public to celebrate the occasion, or simply pay attention to the issue and leverage the publicity for action. So, my personal answer to the question “Do you celebrate World TB Day?” is no. I do not. Instead, I thought I would share the HALI team’s approach to addressing the problem of tuberculosis in Tanzania, and highlight what action is already underway.
Tuberculosis is an ancient disease, one that has afflicted humans since communities began to aggregate in larger groups. But tuberculosis does not just infect humans. TB is zoonotic, and there are a variety of Mycobacterium strains that are infectious to animals and people. In East Africa, one of these strains, Mycobacterium bovis, can infect and cause disease in wildlife, livestock, and people. In cattle, it is often recognized through abortions, or when animals are slaughtered for food by the presence of lesions in bodily tissues, sometimes the lungs or spleen. But M. bovis infection is rare in humans, unless you live in close proximity to animals and rely on them for your livelihood.
Throughout East Africa, communities like the Maassai, Turkana, Sukuma, Barabaig, and Dinka continue to practice traditional livestock husbandry, which for these pastoralist groups is characterized by a nomadic or semi-nomadic livestock production system reliant on extensive grazing and flexible movement of herds and households to available water sources and pasture. In these communities, risks for transmission of M. bovis from animal to people is especially high, as infection occurs when the bacterium is ingested, often through unpasteurized milk or raw or undercooked meat.
HALI has been working with pastoralists in the Ruaha ecosystem of Tanzania to better understand how animals and people are infected with M.bovis and other strains of TB, and how best to prevent exposure and disease in animals and people. Through a ‘healthy herds make healthy people’ approach, the project worked at first to understand the prevalence and transmission pathways of tuberculosis to cattle herds in the area, and investigated the underlying socio-economic challenges influencing household health and livelihoods.
Watch HALI’s field team test cattle for TB…
With a better understanding of the transmission dynamics behind tuberculosis in herds, HALI researchers then began investigating wildlife and environmental sources of infection, by collecting and analyzing samples from water and soil. Working with a team led by Elizabeth Wellington at the University of Warwick, new methods for detecting TB in the environment are now being investigated and validated. Concurrently, through funding from the National Institutes of Health, Goodluck Paul is leading a new effort to better understand TB transmission dynamics between herds and households through a partnership with the Tanzania National Institute of Medical Research and the University of California, San Francisco. This partnership is a true One Health collaboration, with medical doctors and veterinarians teaming up in the field and visiting pastoralist bomas. The teams are testing both animals and people for exposure to TB, research that when combined with the environmental transmission pathways research, will help inform better strategies to combat TB infection in animals and people and reduce the overall TB burden in the Ruaha area.
For more information on HALI’s NIH project or tuberculosis research, please contact the HALI team.
