Livestock boom risks aggravating animal ‘plagues,’ poses threat to food security and world’s poor

ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2011) — Increasing numbers of domestic livestock and more resource-intensive production methods are encouraging animal epidemics around the world, a problem that is particularly acute in developing countries, where livestock diseases present a growing threat to the food security of already vulnerable populations, according to new assessments reported February 10 at the International Conference on Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition & Health.

“Wealthy countries are effectively dealing with livestock diseases, but in Africa and Asia, the capacity of veterinary services to track and control outbreaks is lagging dangerously behind livestock intensification,” said John McDermott, deputy director general for research at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which spearheaded the work. “This lack of capacity is particularly dangerous because many poor people in the world still rely on farm animals to feed their families, while rising demand for meat, milk and eggs among urban consumers in the developing world is fueling a rapid intensification of livestock production.” The global conference, organized by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), brings together leading agriculture, nutrition and health experts to assess ways to increase agriculture’s contribution to better nutrition and health for the world’s most vulnerable people. The new assessments from ILRI spell out how livestock diseases present “double trouble” in poor countries. First, livestock diseases imperil food security in the developing world (where some 700 million people keep farm animals and up to 40 percent of household income depends on them) by reducing the availability of a critical source of protein. Second, animal diseases also threaten human health directly when viruses such as the bird flu (H5N1), SARS and Nipah viruses “jump” from their livestock hosts into human populations. McDermott is a co-author with Delia Grace, a veterinary and food safety researcher at ILRI, of a chapter on livestock epidemics in a new book called Handbook of Hazards and Disaster Risk Reduction. This chapter focuses on animal plagues that primarily affect livestock operations — as opposed to human populations — and that are particularly devastating in the developing world. “In the poorest regions of the world, livestock plagues that were better controlled in the past are regaining ground,” they warn, with “lethal and devastating impacts” on livestock and the farmers and traders that depend on them. These “population-decimating plagues” include diseases that kill both people and their animals and destroy livelihoods. Livestock-specific diseases include contagious bovine ‘lung plague’ of cattle, buffalo and yaks, peste des petits ruminants (an acute respiratory ailment of goats and sheep), swine fever (“hog cholera”) and Newcastle disease (a highly infectious disease of domestic poultry and wild birds). The world’s livestock plagues also include avian influenza (bird flu) and other “zoonotic” diseases, which, being transmissible between animals and people, directly threaten human as well as animal health. McDermott and Grace warn that new trends, including rapid urbanization and climate change, could act as “wild cards,” altering the present distribution of diseases, sometimes “dramatically for the worse.” The authors say developing countries need to speed up their testing and adoption of new approaches, appropriate for their development context, to detect and then to stop or contain livestock epidemics before they become widespread. …