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Schistosomiasis, caused by schistosome parasitic worms is a disease of profound medical and veterinary importance, inflicting unnecessary suffering on poor rural communities in many parts of the developing world, with the greatest burden within sub-Saharan Africa. Environmental change, through natural phenomena or human interventions, such as dam constructions or drug treatments, can substantially impact upon the dynamics and distribution of this disease, with potential positive and negative effects upon human and animal health. Such activities, combined with changes in agricultural practices, place selective pressures on human and animal schistosomes and increase the opportunities for mixing of different species. This mixing within the human or animal hosts can result in novel hybrids which may influence their potential for disease transmission and morbidity. Focusing within Niger and Senegal, our multidisciplinary proposal aims to understand the populations at risk of infection and disease with novel zoonotic hybrid schistosomes. The results obtained regarding the potential role of animal schistosomiasis in maintained infection hot spots, should prove valuable for control programmes, including recent plans for schistosomiasis elimination. We will also enhance the capacity of our West African partner institutions, from schistosome and host identification, population genetic analyses, together with partnership with industry to produce and evaluate new rapid mapping diagnostic tools for the field.

Post-weaning multi-systemic wasting syndrome (PMWS) is a common disease of young pigs in the U.K. It is extremely debilitating, causes considerable suffering and poor welfare, and has a high mortality of up to 20%. The disease was first recognised in 1991 and is now prevalent worldwide. Since over 1.2 billion pigs are reared annually for human consumption, then there are good commercial and ethical reasons why new diseases like PMWS should be controlled or eliminated to ensure a safe, humane and sustainable supply of pork, sausages and ham. At first scientists thought that PMWS was caused by a virus but they now realise that genetic and environmental factors must be involved, along with opportunistic secondary pathogens. This project proposes a unique interdisciplinary approach to investigate this endemic disease and will integrate modern scientific techniques from epidemiology, genetics, microbiology, pathology, molecular immunology and environmental science to identify why PMWS occurs, leading to new control methods. British pig farmers will be heavily involved in the project, thereby guaranteeing that pigs in Britain will be the first to benefit from this research, while collaboration with a major international pharmaceutical company will ensure that new veterinary products will be made available to pig farmers worldwide.

What an animal eats has a major effect on its fertility. More specifically, if female sheep are fed a good diet just before they are mated they will produce more sets of twins than similar ewes fed poor diets. The most remarkable feature of this phenomenon is that the period of good feeding needs to last for only 3 or 4 days. The reason for the effect of good nutrition on the number of twins is put down to a stimulation of egg production in the few days leading up to mating. Why this happens is not at all clear and this research will investigate how this happens. Published studies from our team and other researchers in the field point to the increased energy content of the diet one of the most important reasons for the this effect. In sheep, the main source of this extra energy is plant carbohydrate and as a result we have turned our attention to the role of carbohydrate in our attempts to unravel the biological mechanism behind this phenomenon. Our interest in carbohydrates is based on published information mainly from Australian researchers into the so called 'lupin effect'. In short, the Australians discovered that feeding sheep a supplement of lupin grain for as little as 3 days just before mating will reliably and consistently stimulate the birth of more twins in supplemented flocks. So what is so special about lupins? Well, they have a very high amount of carbohydrate. Lupins contain other things beside carbohydrate. For example, lupins also contain lots of protein. We have successfully mimicked the effect of lupins feeding by giving animals pure carbohydrate as glucose or as propylene glycol. It is our theory that high levels of carbohydrate in the diet act very quickly probably within 3 or 4 days to produce more eggs. The purpose of this project is to test this theory and explain how it works. In order to test our theory we need to study how quickly the food an animal eats affects its egg production. In order to do this we will develop an in vivo model to test the normal speed of response of the ovarian control systems that regulate egg production. We will then examine how high carbohydrate diets modify the response time of these control systems and their effects on egg production. We expect that this research will increase our understanding of how diet affects fertility, which is of particular interest to farmers, veterinarians and medical practitioners.

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