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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.
Interdisciplinary research at the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) has provided core evidence on which global efforts are based in order to eradicate one of the most economically damaging diseases of the cattle industry. The research findings have helped steer national programmes to eradicate Bovine Viral Diarrhoea (BVD) across Europe, South Asia and Australasia, reducing economic losses. Professor Joe Brownlie has additionally led pilot programmes in the UK, providing data for a national scheme, campaigned widely to highlight the issue and secured farming industry awareness and support through media exposure.
Since 2004, researchers in Cambridge have developed a series of generic and flexible models to predict the spread of plant diseases in agricultural, horticultural and natural environments. These now underpin policy decisions relating to the management and control of a number of such diseases, including sudden oak death and ash dieback in the UK (by Defra and the Forestry Commission), and sudden oak death in the US (by the United States Department of Agriculture). This has subsequently had an impact on how practitioners manage these diseases in the field, and on the environment through the implementation of disease mitigation strategies. In the case of ash dieback, the Cambridge work has also directly contributed to public involvement in mapping the spread of the disease.
Research at the University of Liverpool (UoL) has demonstrated the importance of intestinal tapeworm infection as an important and hitherto unrecognised risk factor for a major life-threatening acute intestinal disease (colic) in the horse. A novel serological test for exposure to the tapeworm infection was developed at UoL to provide a diagnostic tool for research and clinical applications. As a result, "best practice" equine preventive healthcare programmes now include anti-helminth and tapeworm control protocols and anti-tapeworm anthelmintics are licensed for use in the horse and marketed throughout the world. This research has had a major impact on equine health resulting in welfare and economic benefits for horses, their owners, veterinary practices and industry.
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.
Impact: Health and welfare and public healthcare policy; demonstrating that community-directed treatment of onchocerciasis with doxycycline is effective where ivermectin is contra-indicated.
Significance: 12,936 onchocerciasis patients were treated safely and protected for at least 4 years. The treatment regime has been adopted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and governments.
Beneficiaries: Patients with onchocerciasis; governments and policy-makers.
Attribution: Studies performed by a long-standing African-European partnership formed and led by Taylor (UoE).
Reach: International; up to 8 million people in the Congo basin; onchocerciasis patients in Africa where ivermectin is not appropriate plus those in South America participating in focal eradication campaigns.
Footrot (FR) causes 90% of lameness in sheep. FR reduces productivity and lowers sheep welfare. Research at the University of Warwick, initiated in 1999 and still active, has led to the development of a novel management strategy for footrot in sheep: prompt antibiotic treatment (PAT) - sheep treated with intramuscular and topical antibiotics within three days of becoming lame with FR. This has resulted in a reduction in the overall prevalence of lameness in sheep flocks in England from 10% (2004) to 5% (2011) and 3% (2013). In 2011, evidence from research at Warwick on PAT was used by the Farm Animal Welfare Council of Great Britain to support their statement that it was feasible to reduce the prevalence of lameness in the national flock from 10% to 2% by 2021. From 2005 onwards, PAT has been disseminated to 50,000 sheep farmers through knowledge transfer (KT) by EBLEX, the levy body for sheep farmers in England using booklets, CDs and more than 100 on-farm events. More than 50% of farmers who had attended an EBLEX KT meeting on lameness stated that they had changed their management of lameness as a result of new information from the event. The Sheep Veterinary Society in the UK has adopted PAT as the recognised management approach for FR and a leading sheep vet in Germany has written a book promoting PAT. The work has been presented in Europe as part of Animal Welfare Research in an Enlarged Europe (AWARE), an EU-funded project educating all countries in the enlarged EU zone on animal welfare (http://tinyurl.com/o6onaxd). In 2012, the lead Warwick researcher Professor Green was awarded the Royal Agricultural Society of England medal specifically for `impact to the sheep farming community in reducing footrot in sheep'.
Bristol University's School of Veterinary Sciences, a global leader in feline medicine, was the first UK centre to develop and commercially offer polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and quantitative (q) PCR assays to detect a range of feline infectious and genetic diseases. Since 2008 there has been a dramatic increase in the number of qPCR tests performed, with over 35,000 tests carried out between 2008 and 2013. The results of genetic testing have informed breeding programmes and resulted in a reduced prevalence of genetic disorders such as polycystic kidney disease (PKD). The results of testing for infectious diseases have informed diagnosis and treatment modalities and, together with the genetic testing, have contributed to significant improvements in feline health and welfare. This work has also generated commercial income in excess of £1.7M, which has been used to further research into feline infectious and genetic diseases.
Strathclyde research underpinned formation of the Scottish Chikhwawa Health Initiative (SCHI) in 2006, to deliver tangible health benefits by reducing major causes of disease and death in Chikhwawa, Malawi. Health impact occurred through training of government personnel and community volunteers, combined with increased infrastructure capacity, at health facilities and in the community, producing improvements in water quality, sanitation and communicable disease control. Within the first 2 years of implementation among a population of 5700 people, a 30% reduction in diarrhoeal disease was achieved, and access to safe water improved through increased water points and improved water storage [1]. Initial success saw expansion of the initiative to 150 communities covering a population of 110,000.
Research at the University of Nottingham (UoN) has had influence on development of health policy in the UK and internationally. It is recognised that the risk of diseases related to obesity and insulin resistance, is partly determined by the nutritional environment experienced during early life. Against a background of scepticism researchers at the UoN have generated data that has been critical in demonstrating the biological plausibility of such associations. This has influenced expert panels and non-governmental organisations in framing their current recommendations for nutrition in pregnancy and infancy, which benefit women and children worldwide.