Livestock and Agriculture

Geraldine Taylor and colleagues at The Pirbright Institute in the United Kingdom will develop a thermo-tolerant vaccine based on human adenovirus 5 (Ad5) against peste des petits ruminants (PPR), a highly contagious disease found in goats and sheep, that enables the distinction between infected and vaccinated animals (known as DIVA vaccines). Current live attenuated vaccines require cold storage, which is unavailable in many developing countries, and vaccinated animals cannot be differentiated from infected animals, complicating disease control efforts.

Syed Abbas of the Public Health Foundation of India in India, with colleagues Manish Kakkar and Krishna Rao, will adapt a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis approach to integrate different perspectives from the animal, environment, and human health sectors on the impact and intervention scenarios of zoonotic diseases, which infect animals and humans. The impact of a single disease and the effects of a specific intervention strategy affect the sectors in different ways.

Simon Reid and colleagues at the University of Queensland in Australia will develop a combined metric using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis to integrate divergent values on impacts of disease interventions from the agricultural, animal husbandry, and human health sectors. These sectors are involved in addressing similar issues such as disease control, but they each have different priorities.

Michael Kane and colleagues from Yale University in the U.S. will create document clustering software incorporated into a web interface to enable clinical researchers to better search through the published literature on both human and veterinary medicine, to promote new discoveries for treating disease. Online biomedical literature and genetics databases carry large amounts of information on animal and human health.

Mohammad Riaz Khan from Charles Sturt University in Australia will test whether the controlled internal release of progesterone in Pakistani dairy buffaloes can induce pregnancy and thereby increase milk production. Buffaloes are an important source of milk in Pakistan, but they breed seasonally and have a silent ovulation. This translates to a long interval (over 500 days) between calves, which limits milk production.