Catherine Cowie
Bovine tuberculosis (bTB) is a disease of global importance, affecting health and economies worldwide. It is increasingly recognised that wildlife populations act as a reservoir for the disease, passing it back to livestock populations despite controls veterinary control efforts, maintaining levels of infection.
The project adopts two approaches to researching how to mitigate bTB transmission. Primarily, a better biological understanding of how the disease passes between individuals and species will be established using contact data loggers. These will record close contacts between farmed cattle, sheep and pigs, and free living wild boar and red deer. The TB status of all these individuals will be known, and as well as back ground levels in the local wildlife population.
At the same time, socio-economic work will be conducted with farmers, hunters and other stakeholders to establish what management strategies they are using that may affect disease transmission, and their opinions about how management might be improved. When wildlife disease transmission is quantified and used to identify improved management strategies, the costs of these will also be estimated and socio-economic techniques such as choice experiments used to evaluate stakeholder opinions on whether these methods might be possible and effective.
The combination of biological and socio-economic work will help to develop workable management solutions for tackling bTB.
Supervisors: Mike Hutchings, Piran White, Dominic Moran, and Christian Gortazar
Address: Kuala Lumpur
The project adopts two approaches to researching how to mitigate bTB transmission. Primarily, a better biological understanding of how the disease passes between individuals and species will be established using contact data loggers. These will record close contacts between farmed cattle, sheep and pigs, and free living wild boar and red deer. The TB status of all these individuals will be known, and as well as back ground levels in the local wildlife population.
At the same time, socio-economic work will be conducted with farmers, hunters and other stakeholders to establish what management strategies they are using that may affect disease transmission, and their opinions about how management might be improved. When wildlife disease transmission is quantified and used to identify improved management strategies, the costs of these will also be estimated and socio-economic techniques such as choice experiments used to evaluate stakeholder opinions on whether these methods might be possible and effective.
The combination of biological and socio-economic work will help to develop workable management solutions for tackling bTB.
Supervisors: Mike Hutchings, Piran White, Dominic Moran, and Christian Gortazar
Address: Kuala Lumpur
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Papers by Catherine Cowie
successful implementation is determined by stakeholders operating at local scales. Such stakeholders
may also have detailed knowledge that would contribute to the development of disease control options
suited to the socio-cultural and environmental conditions where management is undertaken. The aim
of this study was to evaluate stakeholders’ opinions of a list of potential bovine tuberculosis (TB) management
interventions for South Central Spain. This area has high TB prevalence in wildlife and livestock,
so veterinarians, livestock farmers and hunters are all key stakeholders in TB management. A literature
review identified possible management activities. The effectiveness of each intervention was ranked by
local experts, and practicality was ranked by hunters, cattle farmers and veterinarians, using a best–
worst scaling exercise as part of a questionnaire.
The most effective intervention, the banning of supplemental feeding of game species, was not considered
practical by stakeholders. The most effective and practical interventions were the separation of
wildlife and livestock access to waterholes, testing cattle every 3 months on farms with a recent positive
TB case and removing gut-piles from the land after hunting events. Although all three of these options
were well supported, each stakeholder group supported different approaches more strongly, suggesting
that it might be effective to promote different disease management contributions in different stakeholder
communities. This integrated approach contributes to the identification of the optimum combination
of management tools that can be delivered effectively.
brucellosis may share some transmission characteristics which, if managed in common, would result in
more cost-effective management. Here, we identify risk factors shared between these diseases using a
case-control approach and information theoretic modelling. One-hundred cattle farmers in Atlantic Spain
were interviewed about farm characteristics and management practices. The risk factor shared between
both diseases was intra- and inter-herd contact between cattle. Disease-specific risk factors were the presence
of wildlife for TB, and cattle movement between farms for brucellosis. An integrated approach to
disease management needs to consider cattle movement and farm biosecurity, reinforced by an education
campaign to increase farmer awareness. This would be likely to bring benefits in reducing both diseases
and improve the efficiency of any interventions.
Talks by Catherine Cowie