When cows go to town: reducing the risk to livestock and people

Gerard PrinsenJackie Benschop, Nigel French

Reducing the risk to livestock and peopleWhen cows go to town

Source: http://speakupforthevoiceless.org/tag

- 2 - © [email protected]

In this presentation• Key concepts and facts on zoonoses• Researching zoonoses• Meat value chains• Effective and acceptable interventions

Source: Wilson, 2012

o more ‘exchange’ between wild and domesticated animals

o Intensifying, deregulating meat production & processing

o Accelerating mobility of meat (parts) and people, etc.- 3 - ©

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• Animal diseases that are naturally transmitted to humans (viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites)

• Transmission can be airborne (e.g. influenza), via body fluids (e.g. Ebola), or foodborne (e.g. salmonella)

Key concepts and facts (1)

• More than 60% of human pathogens are zoonotic• About 75% of last decade’s new pathogens are

zoonotic• Globalisation increases zoonotic risks (“One

Health”):

What are zoonoses?

Global relevance of zoonoses


• Poor people with poor health conditions are most at risk

• Growing urban meat consumption represents major economic opportunity for traditional livestock producers (pastoralists)

Key concepts and facts (2)

Development relevance of zoonoses

Source: ILRI, 2014

Source: Prinsen, 2015

Supermarkets

Informal marketsTanzania meat import rose 166% between 2008-2012 (Wilson, 2012:7)Substandard and causes enormous

food safety hazards (UNIDO, 2012:iv)


• ZELS brings together 6 donor agencies: £ 20.5 million ($47m)

Researching zoonosesZoonoses attract many funders and reseachers

• Engaging 49 research institutes across globe…• collaborating in 10 countries in Africa and South Asia,• in 11 different research projects

• One project is HAZEL: investigating Hazards Associated with Zoonotic pathogens in Emerging Livestock meat pathways…

• with 5 Tanzanian institutes and 5 overseas institutes,• over Dec 2014 – Dec 2017 period


Understand how zoonotic enteric pathogens – Salmonella and Campylobacter – flow through the meat chain in North Tanzania:

Research objectivesHAZEL

Density of poor livestock keepers (<$1.25/day) o Describe meat value chain

(cattle, sheep, goats, poultry) from ‘beast to bowel’

o Establish where contamination most likely occurs or amplifies

o Determine where and how interventions would be most effective and acceptable

Specific objectives


Biomedical sciences & social sciences HAZEL’s research journey “acquaints a man with strange bedfellows”:

veterinarians, anthropologists, micro-biologists, ecologists, economists,

epidemiologists, a theoretical physicist…

And it works… wonderfully…


Meat value chains (1)

Findings after about one year…In its basic form a meat value chain looks like this:

In Northern Tanzania, some have described the meat chain as:

(SN

V, 2

012:

4)


Meat value chains (2)

In Southern Tanzania it was described like this.

o Livestock/meat moves through hands of many (3 to 10) agents

o Transactional relationships are opportunity/price driven; low trust

o While every transaction node carries risk of contamination; ‘bow tie points’ are not quite known

(Wilson, 2012: 12)

Some early findings re chain

http://livestocklivelihoodsandhealth.org/blog/tying/


Effective and acceptable interventions (1)

• Tanzania has heavy regulatory burden (7 Acts since 2003).“Multiple and often conflicting legal instruments under

jurisdiction of multiple ministries and other official bodies” (Wilson, 2012: viii)

• On other hand; regulations are “lightly implemented”.“Value chain participants are ignorant of the laws or choose to ignore them … authorities not in a position to enforce” (Wilson, 2012: viii)

• From development perspective, the chain “underperforms”.“The chain consistently loses value instead of adding it;

and it puts consumers to health risks” (SNV, 2012: 2)

Recommending additional food safety regulations would probably be very acceptable, but also ineffective.


Effective and acceptable interventions (2)

Next step for social science research is exploring two potential ‘bow tie points’: butchers and meat sellers.

• From who they buy and to who they sell

• Customer expectations and responses

• Views on meat and foodborne diseases

• Perception (indicators) of meat quality

• Relationship with officials

Source: Prinsen, 2015

When cows go to town: reducing the risk to livestock and people

Health & Medicine

Transcript of When cows go to town: reducing the risk to livestock and people