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Impact: Economic / animal health and welfare: Established health schemes to control Bovine Viral Diarrhoea (BVD) on Scottish farms and subsequently underpinned the rationale for cost-effective control strategies that have been adopted in health schemes around the UK. The farm-level savings to the industry from future eradication are estimated by Scottish Government to be £50- £80m.
Significance: BVD is a major endemic disease of cattle in Scotland costing the dairy industry about £38M per year and an additional £11M to consumers.
Beneficiaries: Farmers, cattle, animal health authorities.
Attribution: Professors Gunn and Stott (SRUC).
Reach: The associated health schemes began in Scotland (HI Health) and now operate throughout Britain (UK CHeCS (Cattle Health Certification Standards) Health Scheme). The research underpins BVD control schemes in Ireland and other EU Member States resulting in an avoided output loss of between €500 to €4,000 per dairy farm per year.
Pioneering interdisciplinary research at the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) has enabled governments internationally and global health authorities to respond swiftly to the outbreak of a disease that causes huge economic losses, threatens the livelihoods of vulnerable populations in the developing world and endangers human lives. Supported by proactive dissemination, it has shaped the control policies and risk management strategies of the United Nations and governments across Asia, Africa and Europe, as well as a national contingency plan for the UK. And it has demonstrated that costly vaccination campaigns and mass culling programmes can be avoided in efforts to bring the disease under control.
The University of Nottingham (UoN) led research that resulted in the design, evaluation and national implementation of a new approach to mastitis control on British dairy farms; the `DairyCo Mastitis Control Plan'. The programme, which commenced in 2009, was implemented on farms holding 10-15% of all British dairy cows. The uptake of the scheme is continually increasing and has generated savings to the British dairy industry to the order of £5-10M per annum.
Research conducted at the University of Bristol between 2003 and 2012 on the ecology, epidemiology and control of parasitic flies and worms has improved animal health and welfare in the UK and is addressing a major constraint on global food production — animal disease, particularly in the context of climate change. These are some of the impacts:
Infectious livestock disease poses a major threat to food production, animal welfare, trade, rural ways of life, and sometimes human health. Traditionally, the British government and the veterinary profession have approached its control in top-down fashion, relying on evidence from science and economics. However, controversy over the handling of the 2001 foot and mouth disease epidemic precipitated the recognition of social and cultural influences on understandings of disease and attitudes to their control. Woods' research has brought to light the `human factor' which has operated in the past to influence government, veterinary and farming perceptions of and reactions to livestock disease. Her findings have informed contemporary disease control initiatives, contributed to a culture change in the ways that vets and policy makers think about livestock disease, and convinced them that history offers an important evidence base. Woods' foot and mouth disease research has also had impact in South Korea in the wake of an epidemic there.
Impact: Economics, policy, animal and human health: In 2006, SoS (a Public Private Partnership-PPP) was established involving: University of Edinburgh, a pharmaceutical company, a charity, and the Govt. of Uganda to control sleeping sickness by eliminating Trypanasome carriage in cattle. The prevalence of trypanosomiasis has been reduced by 75% and sleeping sickness cases have fallen year on year since the PPP was established and Uganda has received a cost benefit between US$125 and $400M
Beneficiaries: The Ugandan population, Ugandan Cattle population.
Significance: Sleeping sickness, which is difficult to diagnose and treat in humans, is often fatal. Ten million Ugandans are at risk from sleeping sickness. SoS established a veterinary network in Uganda producing
Attribution: Professor Welburn (University of Edinburgh, UoE) founded SoS and developed essential diagnostic techniques.
Reach: SoS provides a model for the elimination of the disease across sub Saharan Africa in an economically sustainable fashion - with over 22 million people at risk.
A novel, reliable, non-invasive and rapid method has been developed to detect excretion of Mycobacterium bovis, the causal agent of bovine tuberculosis (bTB), into the environment ("shedding") by wildlife hosts. This test has been used to establish the efficacy of the bTB vaccine on reducing environmental contamination by shedding of M. bovis in the faeces (from January 2010). It has also become an important monitoring tool used by VisaVet (European Veterinary Health Surveillance), targeting bTB in wild boar and red deer (from July 2010) to establish bTB reservoirs and take action to protect the cattle stocks. Farmers will benefit and now be able to monitor environmental contamination by M. bovis, which allows them to establish biosecurity best practice.
The method includes both a presence/absence score and a quantitative assay of infectious disease load in faecal matter in the environment. This is the first standard assay to determine environmental contamination, the main route for disease spread to cattle, and allows evaluation of the impacts of vaccination, culling and increased movement of badgers during disease- management strategies. This test also enables precise monitoring of cattle herds infected with bovine tuberculosis (bTB) as it advances from the South West to the North East of England.
Mathematical modelling of livestock infections and disease control policies is an important part of planning for future epidemics and informing policy during an outbreak of infectious disease. Researchers in the Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick, are considered to be at the cutting-edge of developing policy-orientated mathematical modelling for a number of livestock infections. Such models have been used to inform government policy for foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) and a range of other infections including bovine tuberculosis (bTB) and bee infections. From 2008, their work with responsible national and international agencies has focused on statistical inference from early outbreak data, formulating models and inferring parameter values for bTB infection spread within and between farms, developing predictive models of FMD outbreaks in the USA, and extending such models to areas where FMD is endemic. This research has helped to shape policy and determined how policy-makers perceive and use predictive models in real-time.
Veterinarians have long recognised health problems associated with in-breeding and extreme conformation in various pedigree dogs. However, the `Pedigree Dogs Exposed' documentary in 2008, which particularly featured the plight of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels (CKCS), and resultant independent inquiry reports, to which RVC contributed, brought the extent and severity of the issue into the public eye. RVC's ongoing programme of research linked to interaction with stakeholders has contributed to the changes in breed standards instituted by the Kennel Club (KC); understanding of underlying principles governing the relationship between structure and function and affecting desired traits; developing tools to address conformation-related health problems; and driving changes in breeding practice leading to healthier dogs.
Despite increasing surveillance, outbreaks of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in the UK have steadily increased over the past two decades, with the disease now costing an estimated £100 million per annum in test and slaughter costs, and compensation payments.
Research by Professor Wood and Drs McKinley and Conlan has determined that successful control efforts will depend upon within-herd surveillance and also on reducing reintroduction from external sources; these results have directly altered the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs' (Defra) new (July 2013) bovine TB strategy for England, which directly cites Dr Conlan's research when justifying changes in proposed regulations. On publication this research prompted questions during bovine Tuberculosis debates in both Westminster and the Scottish Parliament by Andrew George (MP, St. Ives) and Helen Eadie (MSP, Cowdenbeath) respectively. The work has also received national and specialist media coverage raising public awareness and understanding of bTB control in cattle.