One Health
Food-borne illness risks cross borders, production types
By Greg Cima
Source:
 February 15, 2012
Dr. Lonnie J. King sees a "perfect microbial storm" in the increasingly global interactions of people, animals, and environments.
Speaking late last year at a meeting convened by the Institute of Medicine's Forum on Microbial Threats, Dr. King, dean of The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine, said adaptation among pathogens, increased human susceptibility to disease, changing environments, intensification of the human-animal interface, human and animal movement across international borders, and antimicrobial resistance have increased the risk of food-borne diseases.
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 Following legislative changes, the British Veterinary Association (BVA) has updated its ‘Good Practice Guide to Handling Veterinary Waste’ for England and Wales.
Supported by the Environment Agency the Guide primarily consists of an easy to understand, quick-reference poster enabling vets to categorise and segregate veterinary waste in line with Environment Agency requirements. The poster defines the types of hazardous waste, outlines the types of containers required and sets out the appropriate classification codes.
The Guide is complemented by more detailed web guidance which incorporates useful templates to download.
BVA President Carl Padgett said:
“All businesses have a duty of care to ensure that all waste is stored and disposed of responsibly, that it is only handled or dealt with by those authorised to do so and that appropriate records are kept of all waste that is transferred or received.
“The BVA Guide has been a popular resource for the profession since we first launched it in 2008 making it considerably easier for vets to comply with Hazardous Waste Regulations. The revised poster is hopefully an incentive for practices to check if their requirements have changed and ensure they’re still up-to-date.“
You can see the hazardous waste poster and web advice here and BVA members will receive a hard copy of the poster to display in their practice.
One Health: Water, Animals, Food and Society
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The mission of the One Health Center of Expertise is to assess and respond to global health problems arising at the human-water-animal-food interface and to design, implement, and evaluate practical, cost-effective, and sustainable solutions that focus on the foundations of health in collaboration with local partners.
Research at the One Health Center will focus on reducing the rate of disease and death resulting from malnutrition, unsafe water, and animal- and vector-borne diseases with the aim of designing, implementing and evaluating health interventions at the national, regional, community and household levels.
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Agency adopts strict conditions set out in IOM report
By R. Scott Nolen
Source:
February 15, 2012
Late last year, the National Institutes of Health froze all new grants for studies involving chimpanzees after an Institute of Medicine review found little scientific necessity for using man's closest genetic relative as a research model.
Dozens of ongoing, federally funded projects will be evaluated according to the new stringent conditions adopted by the NIH, which the IOM says are necessary to justify conducting research on chimpanzees.
Advances in alternative research tools and methods, including cell-based tests and other animal models, have made chimpanzees largely nonessential as research subjects, concluded the IOM report, issued Dec. 15, 2011.
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 Neuroscientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have discovered how the sense of touch is wired in the skin and nervous system. The new findings, published Dec. 22 in Cell, open new doors for understanding how the brain collects and processes information from hairy skin.
"You can deflect a single hair on your arm and feel it, but how can you tell the difference between a raindrop, a light breeze or a poke of a stick?" says David Ginty, Ph.D., professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins. "Touch is not yes or no; it's very rich, and now we're starting to understand how all those inputs are processed."
Ginty and his colleagues study how the nervous system develops and is wired. In trying to understand how touch-responsive nerve cells develop, they set out to build new tools that enable them to look at individual nerve cells.
According to Ginty, there are more than 20 broad classes of so-called mechanosensory nerve cells in the skin -- of which only six account for light touch -- that sense everything from temperature to pain. But until now, the only way to tell one cell from another was to take electrical recordings as each type of cell generates a different current based on what it senses.
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 FAO has launched a new version of its EMPRES-i Global Animal Health Information public interface: an integrated tool for global animal disease surveillance, early warning and disease control.
EMPRES-i is a Web-based application of FAO’s Emergency Prevention System (EMPRES) for Transboundary Animal and Plant Pests and Diseases (http://empres-i.fao.org). It was first publicly released in 2009 to support national veterinary services and related organizations by providing access to regional and global disease information to facilitate analysis, prevention and speed the response to animal disease outbreaks when they occur.
Information on animal disease events worldwide can be accessed in EMPRES-i under the Disease Event tab and narrowed by users according to disease, date, species and location. Animal disease events can then be represented over time by using graphs or by location on the EMPRES-i mapping system.
EMPRES-i is under continuous development. Registered users can now also log into the My EMPRES-i section to set up personal data and customize views of disease events according to disease, date and location. Preferences for country or region can be saved in the Directory and Laboratory sections, and maps and analysis can be saved for later reference. An online user’s manual provides a comprehensive introduction to using EMPRES-i and can be consulted when questions arise.
Questions not covered by the manual can be sent directly to EMPRES-i at: empres-i@fao.org.
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 WHO has produced overwhelming evidence to show that the burden of NTDs - which affects over one billion people worldwide - can be controlled, and in many cases eliminated or even eradicated. A new roadmap shows how this can be achieved. "Once considered inevitable companions of poverty, many NTDs are now being brought to their knees, with stunning speed" said WHO's Director-General Dr Margaret Chan in London today.
Read more about the roadmap to end NTDs
Read WHO's Director-General's speech
By Sandra Avant
Source:
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have found that a commercial vaccine is effective against leptospirosis in cattle.
A widespread zoonotic disease, leptospirosis is transmitted naturally from domestic and wild animals to humans. The contagious disease, which is caused by Leptospira bacteria, is spread through contact with food, water or soil contaminated with urine from infected animals. It can affect all farm animals, rodents and wildlife.
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Stem cell scientists at King's College London have announced that they have submitted to the UK Stem Cell Bank (UKSCB) their first clinical grade human embryonic stem (hES) cell lines that are free from animal-derived products, known as 'xeno-free' stem cells.
The cells, which have the potential to become the 'gold standard' lines for developing new stem cell-based therapies, will be the first deposited in the UKSCB based at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, under arrangements that will ensure they are freely accessible to the wider research community. The expectation is that these cells will be grown and processed by the UKSCB to provide stem cell stocks that will be used for clinical research and treatment to benefit patients.
Researchers say this is a significant milestone; this first batch of cells is the culmination of nearly ten years of research funded strategically by the Medical Research Council (MRC) that will keep the UK at the forefront of regenerative medicine.
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Schistosomiasis is a chronic disease caused by parasitic worms. People become infected with schistosomiasis when the parasite penetrates their skin during contact with infested water. This updated fact sheet reveals that less than 14% of people requiring treatment are reached even though the only available treatment is effective, safe and inexpensive.
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