UNIVERSITY of GLASGOW

The Boyd Orr Centre for Population and Ecosystem Health
A cross faculty research centre

Newsletters

New study out in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases

Tiziana Lembo's paper entitled: 'T he Feasibility of Canine Rabies Elimination in Africa: Dispelling Doubts with Data' has just appeared out in PLoS NTD.  The paper synthesizes available data to refute commonly encountered arguments regarding the difficulties of eliminating canine rabies through dog vaccination, concluding that 'there are no insurmountable problems to canine rabies control in most of Africa; that elimination of canine rabies is epidemiologically and practically feasible through mass vaccination of domestic dogs; and that domestic dog vaccination provides a cost-effective approach to the prevention and elimination of human rabies deaths'.



Read more information here 

MRC award for a project to chaperone the Gates funded rabies vaccination program

The Centre has been awarded an MRC grant entitled Understanding how a complex intervention works: designing large-scale vaccination programs (with Dan Haydon and Sarah Cleaveland) for £609,122 over 4 years to start in March 2010. The work will provide capacity to inform and learn from the Gates funded vaccination programs currently underway in Tanzania, South Africa and the Philippines. 

Combating Infectious Diseases of Livestock for International Development

The Centre has been involved in 3 successful applications to this call funded by the BBSRC, DfID, and the Scottish Govt.  Sarah Cleaveland (PI), Richard Reeve and Dan Haydon (co-applicants) on a project entitled Towards the strategic control of endemic foot-and-mouth disease (4 years, £999, 189); Richard Reeve and Dan Haydon (co-applicants) on a project entitled Improving the quality of FMD vaccines by understanding the correlation of vaccine-induced protection with humoral and cellular immune responses (3 years, £114, 450); and Sarah Cleaveland (co-applicant) Development of a vaccination strategy for the control of malignant catarrhal fever (£156, 000), for which she will run the Tanzanian side of the field projects.  These projects will get underway in early 2010.

Bluetongue and African Horse Sickness Grant

Lisa Boden, Tim Parkin and Rowland Kao have been awarded £278K as part of a £697K project with the Institute for Animal Health entitled "Development of epidemiological models for the spread and control of bluetongue and African horse sickness". This project will run for 2.5 years and will help us better understand how to control future incursions of vector borne diseases of livestock in the UK.



Read more information here

Rabies study published in PLoS Biology

Katie Hampson, who joined the Centre in the autumn of 2009 has led a study that establishes important epidemiological parameters for rabies in domestic dog populations in Northern Tanzania.  The paper entitled Transmission Dynamics and Prospects for the Elimination of Canine Rabies reports results from an incredibly detailed study of rabies transmission networks from painstaking traceback studies, and estimates values for the reproductive number (R 0) of rabies that are surprisely low (~1.2).  The findings will be critical in persuading policy-makers that rabies can be feasibly eliminated from dog populations by vaccination programs.  The study was coauthored by Sarah Cleaveland, Dan Haydon, and the late Magai Kaare, together with collaborators from Canada and the US.



Read the
paper here


(Another) British Ecological Society award

Meggan Craft, who joins the Centre in March as an International NSF Post-Doctoral Fellow Fellow in EEB, has been awarded the Elton Prize for best paper by a young researcher in the Journal of Animal Ecology in 2008  Her paper Dynamics of a multihost pathogen in a carnivore community by Craft ME, Hawthorne PL, Packer C, Dobson AP,  J Animal Ecology 77, 1257-1264, shows how Canine Distemper Virus spreads through a multi-host population of canids in the Serengeti.  The paper is notable for its use of behavioural data in formulating the between species transmission processes.

  

British Ecological Society award

Tiziana Lembo has been awarded the Southwood Prize for best paper by a young researcher in the Journal of Applied Ecology in 2008.  Tiziana is a Wellcome VIP Fellow in the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, working with Sarah Cleaveland.  She shares the award with Katie Hampson for her paper Exploring reservoir dynamics: a case study of rabies in the Serengeti ecosystem by Lembo T, Hampson K, Haydon DT, Craft M, Dobson A, Dushoff, Ernest E, Hoare R, Kaare M, Mlengeya, T, Mentzel C, and Cleaveland S, J Applied Ecology 45, 1246-1257.  The paper presents a compelling body of evidence that domestic dogs are the primary reservoir population for rabies in northern Tanzania, a critical point to establish in order to advocate the use of dog vaccination as a rabies control measure.

  

Gates Foundation to fund rabies vaccination in domestic dogs

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are to put $9.8M over 5 years into long-term and spatially extensive dog vaccination programs in Tanzania, the Philippines, and KwaZulu Natal.  Sarah Cleaveland collaborated closely with the World Health Organization (who will administer the grant) in the preparation and submission of this proposal.

Arguing the case for more funding for students from developing countries

Heather Ferguson argues on the op-ed pages of the Financial Times (19th November) for a sea-change in the way we fund PhD studentships for scientists from developing countries. Read the article here.

  

Sarah Cleaveland awarded Trevor Blackburn Award

Sarah Cleaveland has been awarded the Trevor Blackburn Award by the British Veterinary Association in recognition of her work on zoonotic, livestock and wildlife diseases in East Africa and for her outstanding contributions to animal and human health, wildlife conservation and animal welfare in Africa and beyond. The full citation is available here.