Urban Zoo Annual Meeting

Mar 12, 2016 | Blog, Latest news, Urban Zoo Project

Urban Zoo Annual Meeting

Post meeting group photo

The multidisciplinary Epidemiology, ecology and socio-economics of disease emergence in Nairobi Project (Urban Zoo project) held its third annual meeting in London on January 19^th and 20^th, 2016. The meeting was attended by representatives from ILRI, APHRC, KEMRI, University of Nairobi, RVC, University of Liverpool, SOAS and the University of Edinburgh, UCL, IIED. PIs, PhD students, post docs and other researchers involved in the project, as well as members of the External Panel, our group of ‘friendly critics’ who keep the project on track, gathered to discuss this year’s progress.

The Urban Zoo project investigates the role of urbanization in the emergence of zoonotic pathogens. It fosters numerous PhD and MSc projects, thus achieving its capacity-building objectives. Jointly, these studies, which cover diversified fields such as peri-urban wildlife, livestock value chains and the social and spatial components of livestock rearing, will allow for a detailed understanding of Nairobi’s human-livestock-wildlife interfaces.

The “99 Households” (99HH) component of the project uses a landscape genetics approach to understanding E. coli distribution across Nairobi. Major progress in this component was reported. Not only have the sampling plan and laboratory protocols been finalised since the last meeting, but sampling across Nairobi is well underway. Thirty households have already been sampled in 10 sub-locations before December 2015. As planned, samples from humans, livestock, the environment and wildlife are being collected in each household. Quality assurance processes such as duplicate sampling and testing between both University of Nairobi and KEMRI laboratories have been put in place.

Meeting participants taking a break

The pipeline for full genome sequencing of the selected 99HH samples has been finalised and tested on a first batch of samples at the University of Edinburgh. A high level of diversity and MLST was noted.

The group discussed next steps in terms of addressing the value chain component of the Urban Zoo project. It was agreed that sampling of the beef and pork value chains will start in a near future, the poultry value chain sampling being already covered by one of the PhD projects.

A proposal was made to initiate a demand survey in order to determine animal source foods consumption in Nairobi. Ongoing discussions about the scope and feasibility of this study are still ongoing. The PIs reported multiple initiatives in terms of public health trainings and promotions materials and the study team received very positive comments from the external panel. The next and final Urban Zoo meeting is planned to take place in Kenya next year.

Authored by Dr. Maud Carron

Informal food vendors training

Mar 3, 2016 | Blog, Food Safety, Latest news, Nutrition, Urban Zoo Project

The food vendors training was held at Mlango Kubwa on 25th February, 2016 involving 30 plus food vendors carefully selected from thirteen villages in Mathare Valley in Kenya. The food vendors ranged from the ones who sell: meat products, vegetables, fruits, eggs, fish and the ones selling ready made food products.

The aim of the training was to enlighten and empower the participants with practical skills and knowledge on proper food, premise and attire hygiene, sanitation and safety issues.

Muungano wa Wanavijiji food security programme coordinators mobilized the participants while ILRI and APHRC facilitated the training. The activity was in response to vendors’ own requests for capacity-building and offered a crucial opportunity to support livelihoods and bolster community health across eight villages in Mathare.

The training was organised into five sessions:

Session 1: Introduced the participants to the Urban Zoo projects which seeks to understand how disease emerge in urban and peri-urban areas of Nairobi
Session 2: Highlighted the relationship between germs and food safety. Participants were introduced to the adverse effects of germs to health, their portals of entry and that proper hand washing, food preparation and hygiene can prevent most food-borne diseases. This session concluded by demystifying the various myths and truths about food.
Session 3: Participants were introduced to common food-borne symptoms and how proper PPE, hygiene and sanitation of food, body, containers, clothes and towels prevents most of the food-borne infections. A practical session on how germs spread was also demonstrated using drinking chocolate powder and proper hand washing demonstrated using the Glo-germ.
Session 4: This session equipped participants with skills on proper premise hygiene, water treatment, storage of perishable food to avoid spoilage. Various modes of contamination and precautions to take when handling meat, eggs, vegetables, and fruits were also illustrated.
Session 5: The last session equipped and empowered participants on: ways and why they need to improve their product quality; why and how they need to deal with customers and suppliers; advised on promotional activities that they can engage in to improve their product sells; participants were also advised on the importance of innovation, diversification, standardization of recipes and processes.
Practical sessions: The training came to an end with further practical demonstrations on how to wash equipment, sukuma wiki (kales), and meat.

Click to view report

Training action photos [Click photo to enlarged image]

Hand hygiene demo

Meat hygiene demo

Hygiene of equipment demo

Hand hygiene demo using Glow-germ

Wildlife Component-99 Household Study

Jan 12, 2016 | Blog, New Projects, Urban Zoo Project

Wildlife Component-99 Household Study

To complete the One Health picture in the Urban Zoo project is the wildlife thread, an exciting arm of the project and a perfect mix of science and adventure! This focusses on the role of syanthropic wildlife (species that live in close association with humans including birds, rodents, bats and primates) in the epidemiology of disease emergence.

The project involves trapping, ecological sampling, habitat mapping and sample collection and it also gives a clear picture of the diversity and distribution of the syanthropic wildlife in Nairobi. By use of molecular epidemiology, we will be able to investigate the potential transmission pathways of organisms, with E. coli as an example, between the species of wildlife and humans. Various humane trapping methods are used to capture the wildlife as follows:

Birds are trapped using special mist nets which are mounted at dawn along the birds’ flight pathways. Once a bird flies into the net, it gets entangled. It is then removed gently and sampled by a team of professional vets before being released.
Bats also have a special type of mist net which is mounted at dusk along their presumed pathways. The bats then fly into the net and are removed for sampling.
Rodents are trapped using non-lethal shearman traps which are baited by the aromatic small fish commonly referred to as ‘omena’. These traps are left in each household for up to three nights but are checked twice daily.
Primates on the other hand are trapped using a special type of trap in coordination with the Kenya Wildlife Service team with which we work together.

So far, various species of bats such as Epomorphus weighing about 200 grams and the 7 gms Scotophilus have been caught. The most predominant rodent species in Nairobi is the common house mouse ‘Mus’ followed by the Rattus spp. House sparrows seem to have colonized the birds’ kingdom in Nairobi going by our statistics.

Red-billed firefinch is the second most common bird in parts of Nairobi. To enrich and diversify our sampling, two Sykes Monkeys were also trapped and sampled. All the birds and primates are sampled and released back to their natural habitat; some bats are sampled and released whereas others are taken to the lab for full postmortem. All rodents are taken for full postmortem in ILRI’s state-of-the-art BSL 3 laboratory.

Bird captured for sampling

Bat captured for sampling

URBAN ZOO PROJECT: The 99 Household Study

Jan 12, 2016 | Blog, Latest news, Urban Zoo Project, Zoonotic Diseases

URBAN ZOO PROJECT: The 99 Household Study

The 99 households study is now well under way, with sampling being carried out across a range of neighbourhoods in Nairobi. Each week the team targets a different sub-location, where three house-holds are recruited; two with different types of livestock and a third which does not keep any livestock species. Our team of clinical officers and vets collect samples from all human members of the house-hold, along with samples from livestock present, from the general household environment and from any animal source foods in the home. In addition, the wildlife team trap and sample rodents, wild birds, bats, primates and small carnivores in the vicinity.

Sampling a household is intensive, and participants not only consent to donate their faeces to the study, but also give up a good portion of their time, answering questionnaires, aiding the sampling by handling their livestock, and providing access to their property at all hours to allow checking of rodent traps. As such, only three households are sampled in a week, but after 8 weeks more than 400 samples have already been collected.

All samples are sent to our two collaborating laboratories at KEMRI and the University of Nairobi, where they are cultured to grow E.coli bacteria, the primary focus of the study. Multiple individual bacterial colonies are selected from the first culture to go forward for purification and further testing. This means that each animal, human or environmental sample taken in the field can generate up to five subsequent bacterial isolates, and so the number of colonies in the collection is increasing rapidly.

Genetic data from the bacterial samples will allow us to study similarities and differences between these normal bacteria carried by individuals, and how they can be shared between humans, animals and the environment. The questionnaire data collected, among other things, builds on the project’s previous work on value chains, and will allow us to assess how these consumers from a range of social strata are connected to the various value chains that exist in Nairobi for meat and animal products.

A great deal of work has led up to the start of this study, including developing strate-gies for finding participants to represent a diverse section of the city, developing sampling and laboratory protocols, and designing the electronic data capture sys-tems used in the field and laboratories. Everyone involved is delighted that things are now up and running and our colleagues in the UK are eagerly waiting for the first shipment of bacterial DNA to arrive. Watch our blog space!

The 99 Households Study is part of the Urban Zoo Project http://www.zoonotic-diseases.org/project/urban-zoo-project/ which is a joint project between scientists from Kenya and the UK. We are interested in how diseases can be transmitted between animals and people living in close contact in a city environment. The 99 Household study aims to collect in-depth information from 99 families from 33 different neighbourhoods stratified by socio-economic status across the whole of Nairobi. We are testing humans, animals and the home environment for bacteria that can be shared and spread between them.

This article has been written by Judy Bettridge (Post Doc under the 99HH Study, based jointly between the University of Liverpool, UK and International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Kenya).

Using tablet to collect data

Sampling a rabbit in Makongeni

Field team in one of the sampling sites

Sampling the environment

Microbiology plates in readiness for culturing samples

All about Pork-Safe Pork Conference

Jan 12, 2016 | Blog, Latest news, Urban Zoo Project

All about Pork-Safe Pork Conference

The 11TH Safe Pork conference was held from 7th to 10th September 2015 in Porto, Portugal. The Urban Zoo project was represented by Dr. Maurice Karani of ILRI and Dr. Pablo Alarcon of RVC.
The conference focused on the epidemiology and control of foodborne pathogens and antimicrobial resistance in pigs and pork along all produc-tion chains. Additionally, international exchange of ideas, research and policy themes related to the management of zoonosis and food safety in the pig and pork sector, with an integrated approach from “farm to fork” in relation to the “One Health” concept was explored

Our highlight of the conference was the oral presentation by Maurice Kara-ni, a veterinarian and a research assistant with the urban zoo project and an MSc student at the Royal Veterinary College titled, ‘Assessing and understanding food safety risk practices in Nairobi pork food system: a value chain approach’. The presentation was awarded the best oral presen-tation in the student category.
The work on Nairobi’s pig value chain, one of several Urban Zoo value chain outputs, will be published in 2016.