CABI Blogs: hand picked... and carefully sorted

Neglected tropical diseases: the future is multidisciplinary and ‘one health’

A new society has been born - the International Society for Neglected Tropical Diseases. The society’s reason for existence is to provide a space where people from different disciplines can meet and develop new ways to control neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). I went to their inaugural conference. The talks were many and varied as was the audience: there were experts in anthropology, communication and education, microbiology and molecular biology, health workers in the field, and last but not least - veterinarians.

Barking mad! can humans make more sense of barking dogs?

Dog barking can be a nuisance, but why do they do it? Elsa Flint of Massey University argues that we need a better understanding of why dogs bark if we are to find ways of managing and controlling this behaviour. In an article in CAB Reviews, Flint points out that domestic dogs bark in a context-specific way – not just to guard territory or randomly, as had been suggested in the past. Through barking, dogs communicate excitement, requests, distress and can help to build bonds within packs.

Illustration by Balthasar, from a photograph by Josh Plueger

Flint believes that if people understand barking as a more complex behaviour, they may become more tolerant of it. Evidence suggests even human babies can distinguish aggressive and non-aggressive barking, although people have more difficulty understanding growling. She queries whether the negative response of humans to barking is more about the noise itself or what they think the dog is communicating.

Genetic differences in dog breeds do affect how much they bark, and it appears that breeds used for herding tend to bark the most. It may be possible to selectively breed dogs that bark less. Environmental triggers that spark off barking are very varied, and one study showed that dogs in an animal welfare centre barked more in response to heavy metal music than to any other stimulus, including human voices.

In contrast, soothing music can help decrease barking. Chamomile and lavender scent can be used to calm dogs and reduce barking. Pheromones can calm dogs that are suffering from anxiety stress. Exercise and providing stimuli such as toys or hidden treats mean dogs are less prone to bark at unexpected noises.

Is the world better or worse than it was 20 years ago?

Focussing on the UN Sustainable Development Conference – Rio+20, which starts tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, I came across an interesting interactive way to quickly assess if the world is doing better or worse than it did 20 years ago.

Rio+20 – Platform now open for voting on solutions to achieve ‘the future we want’

Banner from http://vote.riodialogues.org/?l=en

It is only 8  days to the start of the Rio+20 UN Conference, where world leaders, along with thousands of participants from governments, the private sector, NGOs and other groups, will come together to shape how we can reduce poverty, advance social equility and ensure environmental protection to get to the future we want. The high level UN conference will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 20-22 June 2012, to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), which was also held in Rio de Janeiro. The official launching of the conference took place a week ago, on 5^th June 2012, during World Environment Day (WED), which is celebrated on June 5^th each year since 1972, to highlight awareness of the environment and promote political attention and action.

The Future of Our Forests

I recently attended ‘Future Forestry’, the Institute of Chartered Foresters’ Annual Conference. The speakers were excellent and covered a wide range of topics – from the changing world in forest management through to forest research in a changing climate. The presentations are all now freely available to view on the ICF website if you’d like to know more.

The conference also saw a preview of (now released) films on tree diseases from the Forestry Commission and Defra. The films focus on the threat in particular from Phytophthora ramorum and Phytophthora kernoviae, and how we can all help to keep these organisms at bay.

More on Phytophthora from the Forestry Commission  

Links to the Phytophthora films

REDD and forest carbon – finding a path through the trees

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) is a key concept in trying to tackle climate change. The core idea is that a way can be found to fund the avoidance of deforestation and forest degradation, thus reducing carbon emissions. But will it work?

Rainforest, Santa Elena, Costa Rica  Dirk van der Mad

Frances Seymour, Director-General of CIFOR, the Centre for International Forestry Research, has analysed the published studies, and concludes that there is “a giant optimisation problem, characterised by multiple objectives and ‘dilemmas’ to be resolved in the choice of alternative approaches to achieving them.”

In an article in CAB Reviews, Seymour looks at the practicalities. The studies generally anticipate that the “opportunity cost” of avoiding deforestation will be relatively low. However, establishing an internationally acceptable system that can achieve and monitor REDD objectives will be a substantial task.

Mystery disease in Ethiopia solved: linked to weed toxin

Imagine this…

A mysterious disease terrorising your community, not infectious but spreading nonetheless, and killing your relatives and neighbours. All you want to do is pack your bags and flee. Worse, when your plight comes to the attention of the health authorities, they are stumped and its not going to be easy or quick to solve.

A recent example of this kind of illness is “nodding disease” (South Sudan, Uganda, and Tanzania), which affects children 5-15 years old: they suffer epileptic seizures which causes their heads to nod, and they end up severely disabled and finally die. The USA’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC) is working to identify the cause: so far, the best guess is that it’s linked to the parasite that causes river blindness combined with an autoimmune reaction, and exposure to chemicals could predispose.

Other examples of non-communicable disease outbreaks

On Global Health, I found there are outbreaks going back to 1911 (epidemic dropsy) but more recent ones were in India,  Bangladesh, Nigeria, Brazil, China, Afghanistan and even the USA.

 What are the likely causes for these outbreaks? The body of research, as found on databases like Global Health, tells us that they could be contamination of food and water supply, exposure to chemicals or heavy metals in the environment, or even use of traditional medicine.

 Mystery liver disease in Ethiopia with a ‘happy’ ending

Can public health authorities in low-income countries solve & stop such outbreaks?   Yes. In 2005, in Ethiopia, a 4 year long outbreak of liver disease in Tseda Emba, a small village of the Tahtay Koraro district of Tigray, finally reached the attention of the Tigray Health Bureau (THB). Now, in 2012, the multidisciplinary and one-health approach they initiated has “solved” the mysterious illness, significantly reducing new cases. 

 The research work was the subject of an entire session at the recent World Congress Public Health (WCPH-2012) in Ethiopia, and is now published as 5 papers in the supplement to April 2012’s edition of Ethiopian Medical Journal (EMJ). [Abstracts to these papers will be available on Global Health]. It demonstrates the relevance of the one-health approach to public health in low-income countries and is a fascinating detective story….