Seropositivity to louping ill virus in dogs in the UK.

Background: Louping ill virus (LIV) is a tick-borne flavivirus that can cause fatal meningoencephalomyelitis in dogs. Four dogs with confirmed LIV infection and a case series of dogs with suspected flavivirus infection have been reported in the UK. However, underreporting of LIV infection due to lack of testing is suspected.

Refugia, climatic conditions and farm management factors as drivers of adaptation in Nematodirus battus populations.

Parasites are known for their ability to rapidly adapt to changing conditions. For parasitic helminths, changes in climate, along with farming and management practices associated with the intensification of livestock farming, provide novel challenges which can impact on their epidemiology and control. The sustainability of livestock production partially relies on effective control of helminth infection.

Social isolation of unfamiliar cattle by groups of familiar cattle.

Domestic herbivores show a strong motivation to form associations with conspecifics and the social dynamics of any group is dependant on the individuals within the group. Thus, common farm management practices such mixing may cause social disruption. Social integration of new group members has previously been defined as a lack of aggressive interactions within the group.

The consequential costs of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) breakdowns in England and Wales.

Bovine tuberculosis (bTB) is a globally distributed zoonotic disease with significant economic impacts. Control measures in Great Britain include testing for and culling diseased animals. Farmers receive compensation for the value of culled animals, but not for the consequential costs of having to comply with testing and associated control measures.

Patterns of mortality in domesticated ruminants in Ethiopia.

Background: Premature death of livestock is a problem in all ruminant production systems. While the number of premature ruminant deaths in a country is a reasonable indicator for the nation's health, few data sources exist in a country like Ethiopia that can be used to generate valid estimates. The present study aimed to establish if three different data sets, each with imperfect information on ruminant mortality, including abortions, could be combined into improved estimates of nationwide mortality in Ethiopia.

Efficacy of Intra-Operative Topical Wound Anaesthesia to Mitigate Piglet Castration Pain-A Large, Multi-Centred Field Trial.

Piglet castration results in acute pain and stress to the animal. There is a critical need for effective on-farm methods of pain mitigation. Local anaesthesia using Tri-Solfen (Animal Ethics Pty Ltd.

Descriptive analysis of nematode management practices and Nematodirus battus control strategies on UK sheep farms.

Background: Farm management practices have a major impact on nematode population dynamics. The presented study aimed to understand current nematode management practices on UK sheep farms; with a particular focus on Nematodirus battus because of the changing epidemiology, and emerging anthelmintic resistance observed in this species.

Methods: A 42 question online survey covering grazing management, farm demographics and parasite control strategies was developed and distributed to the farming community in 2016.

Estimating antimicrobial usage based on sales to beef and dairy farms from UK veterinary practices.

Background: Accurate estimation of antimicrobial use (AMU) is important in assessing reduction of agricultural AMU. This cross-sectional study aimed to evaluate several approaches for estimating AMU at the herd level and to report on AMU for beef and dairy farms in Scotland.

Methods: Pharmaceutical sales data for 75 cattle herds (2011-2015) were screened for antimicrobial products and aggregated by herd and year.

Exploring the longitudinal dynamics of herd BVD antibody test results using model-based clustering.

Determining the Bovine Viral Diarrhoea (BVD) infection status of cattle herds is a challenge for control and eradication schemes. Given the changing dynamics of BVD  virus (BVDV) antibody responses in cattle, classifying herds based on longitudinal changes in the results of BVDV antibody tests could offer a novel, complementary approach to categorising herds that is less likely than the present system to result in a herd's status changing from year to year, as it is more likely to capture the true exposure dynamics of the farms. This paper describes the dynamics of BVDV antibody test values (measured as percentage positivity (PP)) obtained from 15,500 bovines between 2007 and 2010 from thirty nine cattle herds located in Scotland and Northern England.

Considering appropriate replication in the design of animal social network studies.

Social network analysis has increasingly been considered a useful tool to interpret the complexity of animal social relationships. However, group composition can affect the contact structure of the network resulting in variation between networks. Replication in contact network studies is rarely done but enables determination of possible variation in response across networks.

Evaluating Diagnostic Tests With Near-Perfect Specificity: Use of a Hui-Walter Approach When Designing a Trial of a DIVA Test for Bovine Tuberculosis.

Active surveillance of rare infectious diseases requires diagnostic tests to have high specificity, otherwise the false positive results can outnumber the true cases detected, leading to low positive predictive values. Where a positive result can have economic consequences, such as the cull of a bovine Tuberculosis (bTB) positive herd, establishing a high specificity becomes particularly important. When evaluating new diagnostic tests against a "gold standard" reference test with assumed perfect sensitivity and specificity, calculation of sample sizes are commonly done using a normal approximation to the binomial distribution, although this approach can be misleading.

An empirical comparison of isolate-based and sample-based definitions of antimicrobial resistance and their effect on estimates of prevalence.

Antimicrobial resistance is primarily a problem in human medicine but there are unquantified links of transmission in both directions between animal and human populations. Quantitative assessment of the costs and benefits of reduced antimicrobial usage in livestock requires robust quantification of transmission of resistance between animals, the environment and the human population. This in turn requires appropriate measurement of resistance.

Combining Slaughterhouse Surveillance Data with Cattle Tracing Scheme and Environmental Data to Quantify Environmental Risk Factors for Liver Fluke in Cattle.

Liver fluke infection causes serious disease (fasciolosis) in cattle and sheep in many regions of the world, resulting in production losses and additional economic consequences due to condemnation of the liver at slaughter. Liver fluke depends on mud snails as an intermediate host and infect livestock when ingested through grazing. Therefore, environmental factors play important roles in infection risk and climate change is likely to modify this.

Using Combined Diagnostic Test Results to Hindcast Trends of Infection from Cross-Sectional Data.

Infectious disease surveillance is key to limiting the consequences from infectious pathogens and maintaining animal and public health. Following the detection of a disease outbreak, a response in proportion to the severity of the outbreak is required. It is thus critical to obtain accurate information concerning the origin of the outbreak and its forward trajectory.

Molecular detection of Toxoplasma gondii in water samples from Scotland and a comparison between the 529bp real-time PCR and ITS1 nested PCR.

Waterborne transmission of Toxoplasma gondii is a potential public health risk and there are currently no agreed optimised methods for the recovery, processing and detection of T. gondii oocysts in water samples. In this study modified methods of T.

Clinical Research Abstracts of the British Equine Veterinary Association Congress 2015.

Reasons For Performing Study: Although fasciolosis is an important livestock disease worldwide, the public health importance of human fasciolosis has increased in recent years and it is recognised as an important re-emerging zoonotic disease, its epidemiology and pathogenicity in donkeys, and the epidemiological role they may play have not been determined.

Objectives: To investigate the epidemiology and pathogenicity of fasciolosis in donkeys.

Study Design: Cross-sectional coprological and retrospective post-mortem study.

E. coli O157 on Scottish cattle farms: evidence of local spread and persistence using repeat cross-sectional data.

Background: Escherichia coli (E. coli) O157 is a virulent zoonotic strain of enterohaemorrhagic E. coli.

Two major ruminant acute phase proteins, haptoglobin and serum amyloid A, as serum biomarkers during active sheep scab infestation.

Two ruminant acute phase proteins (APPs), haptoglobin (Hp) and serum amyloid A (SAA), were evaluated as serum biomarkers (BMs) for sheep scab-a highly contagious ectoparasitic disease caused by the mite Psoroptes ovis, which is a major welfare and production threat worldwide. The levels of both APPs increased in serum following experimental infestation of sheep with P. ovis, becoming statistically significantly elevated from pre-infestation levels at 4 weeks post-infestation.

Implications of within-farm transmission for network dynamics: consequences for the spread of avian influenza.

The importance of considering coupled interactions across multiple population scales has not previously been studied for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in the British commercial poultry industry. By simulating the within-flock transmission of HPAI using a deterministic S-E-I-R model, and by incorporating an additional environmental class representing infectious faeces, we tracked the build-up of infectious faeces within a poultry house over time. A measure of the transmission risk (TR) was computed for each farm by linking the amount of infectious faeces present each day of an outbreak with data describing the daily on-farm visit schedules for a major British catching company.

Field efficacy of praziquantel oral paste against naturally acquired equine cestodes in Ethiopia.

The efficacy of an oral formulation of praziquantel (Equitape, Horse paste, Fort Dodge) in the reduction of cestode egg counts and serum antibody level against Anoplocephala perfoliata was assessed in 44 donkeys under field conditions. The donkeys were confirmed both by faecal examination and serum antibody assessed by an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay to have natural infection with tapeworms. The donkeys were randomly allocated into treatment (n = 22) and control (n = 22) groups.

Identifying the seasonal origins of human campylobacteriosis.

Human campylobacteriosis exhibits a distinctive seasonality in temperate regions. This paper aims to identify the origins of this seasonality. Clinical isolates [typed by multi-locus sequence typing (MLST)] and epidemiological data were collected from Scotland.

Quantifying the sources of variability in equine faecal egg counts: implications for improving the utility of the method.

The faecal egg count (FEC) is the most widely used means of quantifying the nematode burden of horses, and is frequently used in clinical practice to inform treatment and prevention. The statistical process underlying the FEC is complex, comprising a Poisson counting error process for each sample, compounded with an underlying continuous distribution of means between samples. Being able to quantify the sources of variability contributing to this distribution of means is a necessary step towards providing estimates of statistical power for future FEC and FECRT studies, and may help to improve the usefulness of the FEC technique by identifying and minimising unwanted sources of variability.