First, the New Agriculturalist ran a series of articles focused on livestock disease this November, including a nice story on HALI.  For a great overview of HALI’s many tentacles in research and development, please check out the NewAg piece “Addressing Zoonotic Disease and Livelihoods in Tanzania.”

Second, HALI Principal Investigator Jonna Mazet was recently featured by the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges (AAVMC) in the Veterinary Spotlight. The article The Virus Hunters – Tracking Down the Next HIV describes Jonna’s role with the PREDICT project, and how PREDICT is using One Health strategies to detect emerging pathogens and prevent global pandemics.

Finally, just for fun, watch the Contagion trailer again (or for the first time). I promise, not all bloggers are like Jude Law…

Well dear readers, it could only be our new snow machine, a state of the art Stirling Cryogenics liquid nitrogen generating plant.  It would’ve been there by Christmas but Santa’s sleigh was delayed for customs inspection in Dar so he contracted a flat-bed to deliver the crate up the TanZam highway instead.

We’ve been waiting patiently for months for this generator, so don’t be surprised if you walk by the HALI office this week for a visit and see a snow globe blanketing our beautiful and custom-built LN2 outbuilding.

Plant installation and training are the next steps, that’s when the HALI team will nominate our own Mr. Freeze to maintain and operate the plant.  Who will it be?  Zika, Muhiddin, Goodluck, Erasto?  Stay tuned, same bat-time, same bat-channel (and hang on to your rice!)...

Unloading the liquid nitrogen generator - Let it snow!

Hey Santa, where's your PPE?

While the majority of us are enjoying the holidays, reuniting with family and friends, dining, sharing gifts and general Christmas cheer, there are some folks who just keep on working.  That’s right, working on Christmas.  It is these fine folks who make the holidays possible, allowing us to leave work and responsibility behind for a few days and take a break.  Whether they are firemen, cops, jailers, doctors, nurses, grocers, that guy at the wine shop, Walmart employees, telemarketers, bloggers, and writers, these folks get things done on Christmas.  They are all Santa Claus.

For the HALI team, our Santa Claus is Joseph Malakalinga, lab technician at the Sokoine University of Agriculture.  This Christmas eve when Santa is shimmying down your chimney to eat your cookies and drop some loot under your tree, our Santa Joseph will be jingling a large key ring, shimmying into our container lab, and dropping some data points on our lab freezer temperature logs.  Why?  Because the holiday season is just lovely, unless you get a panicky alert from a lab manager about a cold chain meltdown and loose your entire sample archive.  Thankfully, Santa Joseph will give HALI the gift of sample stewardship, shepherding our freezers and liquid nitrogen supply (Morogoro snow) through the season and into the New Year.  Maybe he’ll even read them the Night Before Christmas or drop an orange in their lab stockings.

A toast to you, Santa Joseph, you win my Christmas MVP award for 2011. And Happy Holidays from the HALI team, may your fridges and freezers avoid failure, and your own Santa Clauses spread the Christmas cheer…

Update: Ally Kitime, our excellent lab manager at SUA, has also been shimmying into the lab to check on the cold chain over the holidays.  As always, our operations wouldn’t be successful without Baba Ally.  Asante sana Kitime and Happy New Year!

Joseph (on the right) and his sleigh...

The HALI team is also in the middle of our own Year of the Bat in Tanzania.  Just last year, the HALI team had very little experience with bats. But early in 2011, we had the pleasure of learning some capture and sampling techniques from Alison Peel, a talented young researcher from Cambridge Infectious Diseases Consortium, who was sampling fruit bats (E. helvum) along the Swahili Coast.  After working with Alison, our team, supported in part by the PREDICT Surveillance groups extensive experience and guidance through Jon Epstein and EcoHealth Alliance and by our own PREDICT Tanzania staff scientist Liz VanWormer, continued training and practicing their capture and sampling skills, until confident that they could identify bat roosting sites, set-up mist-nets in locations for efficient capture, and safely handle and sample bats without danger to the animals or themselves.

This November, the team began surveilling bats in the Idodi Division of Iringa District Tanzania – check out our slideshow (photos by Liz Vanwormer).  The field team has captured both fruit bats and insectivorous bats, and stored collected samples in liquid nitrogen for analysis at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, where PREDICT has based diagnostic and pathogen testing operations for the East Africa region.  Through this surveillance, we hope to identify viral pathogens circulating in bats, to learn if there are any viral agents that pose a public health risk.  We also hope to teach people in the areas where we are sampling about bats, and about the many benefits bats have on economic and ecosystem health.

Also as part of the Year of the Bat, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations released an informative publication on the role of bats in emerging zoonotic diseases.  You can download this publication, which also features contributions from the PREDICT team, Investigating the Role of Bats in Emerging Zoonoses on the FAO publication website, or by clicking this link.

That’s exactly what the HALI team was asking this October in Ruaha National Park. No, it wasn’t a safari or game drive, just another day at the office for team members Annette Roug, Deana Clifford, Goodluck Paul, Erasto Katowo, and the Ruaha National Park veterinarian, Dr. Epaphras Alex.

The HALI team relaxing in Ruaha after a long day of counting buffalo.

The team spent four days in Ruaha testing different methods for counting buffalo to find the best method for determining the number of males and females, and young and old animals in each herd.  The team counted animals from the project Land Rover, and also video taped the herds to see if video playback will assist with the count.  Why you might ask?  Well, determining the number of calves and cows, the body condition of the buffalo,  and the number of buffalo in each herd is an important first step for determining if Ruaha’s buffalo populations are declining or impacted by disease.  Additionally, the team collected fecal samples from buffalo and impala for disease and parasite testing.

After the initial sampling effort, Dr. Roug, who is a PhD candidate from UC Davis, will be refining her study approach and applying for funding to conduct additional buffalo health work in Ruaha in collaboration with the Tanzania National Parks.

There are 41 buffalo in the picture…

5:15 am: The tents are wrapped in darkness and only the beginnings of birdsong when cell phone alarms start echoing through the campsite. Whispering to each other, the HALI team members check off a well-known list…dryshipper, ice packs, cryovials, mobile centrifuge…as they squeeze the supplies into the back of the field car. Headlamps click off and the team is ready to travel the winding dirt road to the farms where their rodent traps are waiting. On the way, they watch the villages waking up – women carrying water, dogs slipping like shadows between the houses, and roosters announcing the morning. Children wave from doorways as the sun starts to spill over the hills.

Rodents of varying shapes and size are already waiting in the traps when the car arrives. The HALI team members waste no time in making a count and moving the traps to the shade. It’s still very early, but the clear sky promises hot hours ahead. By the side of the single large tree, a sampling station springs to life. The table unfolds, data sheets are prepared, and rows of labeled tubes stand ready.  Pulling on their PPE (personal protective equipment), the team attracts attention from people passing at a distance and the long line of cows walking to water.

Muhiddin collects samples from a wild rodent. Nice PPE, Muhiddin!

7 am, and the sampling begins. Working carefully to keep the team and animals safe, the rodent handlers collect the blood, feces, and oral swabs that will allow them to look for viruses that can be transmitted from wildlife to humans. Rodents, like the ones being sampled, commonly share the farms and houses of the people living in rural village areas. HALI is investigating the risk of emerging diseases that could be spread in saliva, blood, or droppings from these animals. As changing environments drive people and wildlife into closer contact, the chances for disease transmission increase. Understanding these changes and the pathogens present in these areas helps HALI protect animal and human health.

1 pm, and the sun is baking down. The HALI team has been working tirelessly to carefully anesthetize each animal and collect the key samples before releasing the rodents at the sites where they were captured. A cable drapes out of the hood of the car connecting the battery to an inverter to an electric strip to the mobile centrifuge, where the blood samples are spinning. The whir of the motor and the sight of boxes being lowered into the foggy interior of the dry shipper are drawing the sampling to a close. After the last of the samples are safely stored and everything has been cleaned, the HALI team members climb out of their PPE suits with a sigh of relief, knowing that a lunch of ugali, mchicha (greens), and kuku (chicken) awaits them in a nearby village.

Wildlife-human interfaces: Rodents can move freely between fields and houses in rural villages

4 pm, and the evening will soon be approaching. After organizing and cleaning their supplies and taking a short, but well-earned break, the HALI team is back in the field, scoping out new sites for trapping near a pastoralist boma. Surrounded by the listening family as well as their cows, goats, and dogs, the team sits down to discuss HALI’s work and to ask permission to trap rodents in the area. With patience and a lot of laughter, the Maasai family listens to the strange request, and then watches curiously from a distance as team members bait the traps with a recently perfected blend of peanut butter and corn flour, and head out to set them. The family is unfailingly welcoming, and when the team members return for sampling the next morning, hot tea and freshly made vitumbua (rice doughnuts) will be waiting for them, along with another round of questions.

7 pm, and the team is heading back to Tungamalenga, the village closest to their campsite. Over a late dinner of wali (rice) and mbuzi choma (roasted goat) with the bass of bongo fleva songs and the hum of a generator in the background, they discuss the plans for their next and final day of trapping for this trip. The following evening will find them in Iringa again, but travel for the samples has only begun. Soon, these samples will be headed to the HALI lab team’s new viral diagnostic laboratory at Sokoine University of Agriculture in Morogoro for RNA extraction and real-time PCR analyses. From there they might make their way to additional labs in Uganda and the US. You won’t find the HALI field team waiting at the office to hear the results. They’re already in a new environment- talking to the communities and scouting out the best bat roosts in town for their next trapping trip.

“A day in the field with HALI” is a new series of blog posts that will follow the diverse field activities of the HALI team. Stay tuned for future posts on water sampling, household interviews, and surveying buffalo!