Health and Animal Agriculture in Developing Countries

Several large-scale outbreaks, such as Highly Pathogen Avian Influenza (HPAI type H5N1) or Avian Flu, Swine Flu (H1N1), Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE or “Mad Cow” disease), have asserted themselves in less than a decade. Effective responses to these new threats have to be based on better public and private understanding of zoonotic-risk generation and transmission, and these insights must be integrated into a new generation of policies and practices governing animal production, processing, supply chain management, and public health. Given the complexity and socioeconomic extent of agrofood systems, meeting these challenges successfully requires multidisciplinary research, insights, and policy guidance.

This book introduces such an approach, applied to one of the leading modern pandemic threats, HPAI. While the work reported, here, is of general relevance to past, present, and future zoonotic diseases, HPAI, itself, remains a very serious threat to animal and human populations. The present research was part of a leading international effort to understand and address this disease’s emergence and the larger implications of policy responses to it. The HPAI is extremely contagious and deadly to poultry, much less contagious but very deadly to people, and is still undergoing rapid mutation and reassortment in an established reservoir of tens of billions of domestic animals/poultry. To better understand this threat and devise more socially effective defenses against it, the UK Department for International Development supported our multidisciplinary HPAI research project for Southeast Asia and Africa.