Containment and conversion: Urban livelihoods and the circulation of value amid South Africa's avian influenza outbreak.

In South Africa the racialized contours of economic life powerfully shape the distribution of who owns poultry enterprises, who is employed to labor in them, who consumes poultry products, and in which way. When, in late 2017, an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N8) decimated the South African poultry sector, it revealed the ontological transformations of industrial egg-laying poultry into "cull birds" and then into , the quintessential rural chicken. It thus showed how distinct regimes of value "articulate," blurring infectious and noninfectious concerns as new chains of conversion were inaugurated across domestic and global economies.

An entry risk assessment of African horse sickness virus into the controlled area of South Africa through the legal movement of equids.

South Africa is endemic for African horse sickness (AHS), an important health and trade-sensitive disease of equids. The country is zoned with movement control measures facilitating an AHS-free controlled area in the south-west. Our objective was to quantitatively establish the risk of entry of AHS virus into the AHS controlled area through the legal movement of horses.

Critical Casimir interactions of colloids in micellar critical solutions.

We study the temperature-dependence of critical Casimir interactions in a critical micellar solution of the nonionic surfactant C12E5 dissolved in water. Experimentally, this is achieved with total internal reflection microscopy (TIRM) which measures the interaction between a single particle and a flat wall. For comparison, we also studied the pair interactions of a two dimensional layer of colloidal particles in the identical micellar system which yields good agreement with the TIRM results.

Provincial Veterinary Services respond to drought in South Africa.

In 2018, Cape Town, South Africa, nearly ran out of water. That this has not yet happened is in large part due to the water-saving efforts of its citizens. It is highly likely that this situation will be repeated in Cape Town and that similar situations will be experienced by major cities in other parts of the world.

Human surveillance and phylogeny of highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N8) during an outbreak in poultry in South Africa, 2017.

Background: In June 2017, an outbreak of the highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N8) was detected in commercial poultry farms in South Africa, which rapidly spread to all nine South African provinces.

Objectives: We conducted active surveillance for the transmission of influenza A(H5N8) to humans working with infected birds during the South African outbreak.

Methods: Influenza A(H5N8)-positive veterinary specimens were used to evaluate the ability of real-time PCR-based assays to detect contemporary avian influenza A(H5N8) strains.