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National Biosecurity Regimes
Published in Kezia Barker, Robert A. Francis, Routledge Handbook of Biosecurity and Invasive Species, 2021
Damian Maye, Kin Wing (Ray) Chan
‘Biosecurity’ is a contested concept, but in broad terms it refers to mitigation strategies that prevent disease incursion and the spread of infectious pathogens among humans, animals, plants and other natural environments (Koblentz, 2010). Since the onset of African swine fever (ASF) and highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), reducing the risk to health from the transnational spread of infectious diseases across nations and regions is a global priority. Strategies to manage disease operate at multiple scales, including regulatory frameworks set by national governments and intergovernmental organisations (Wilkinson et al., 2011; Maye et al., 2012). The economic interests of countries can ‘deflect international economic concerns requiring biosecurity solutions to be reworked at local scales’ (Enticott, 2014a, 42). Politics at different scales shape the production, distribution and consumption of livestock and plant products, involving global organisations (e.g. the Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO) and national and local government departments (Chan, 2015). This chapter examines national biosecurity regimes to contain and manage the impact of infectious animal and plant diseases, including control over the implementation and monitoring of biosecurity measures and relations with international and local actors.
Animal Tuberculosis
Published in Lloyd N. Friedman, Martin Dedicoat, Peter D. O. Davies, Clinical Tuberculosis, 2020
Alaku55 has identified steps to be implemented as fundamental practice to initiate the control of bovine tuberculosis in Ethiopia. These steps can also be considered in other countries where there is currently no control programme for the disease. Cattle over the age of 6 months should be permanently marked or identified using a systematic approach.Hygiene and management practices should be implemented to increase biosecurity. Cattle should be kept further from human dwellings to decrease opportunities for transmission. Creation of legislation is necessary to register individual dairy farms, and notify vets of cattle purchases, sales, or transfers.Regular testing and meat inspection practices are required to identify infected individuals. Ideally testing of infected herds should occur in a predetermined pattern to establish whether there are any changes in the rate of new infections, and biannual testing programs should be put in place for those herds that have gained disease-free status, to confirm that this disease-free status remains (Figure 22.2).A system of insurance or initiation of a government policy to reimburse farmers for the loss of individual cattle will make it possible for a farmer to maintain their livelihood should an infected cow need to be removed from the herd. It is extremely rare to find such a system in low income countries, however, the current practice of condemnation in low income countries is not well studied or documented.
The CRISPR revolution and its potential impact on global health security
Published in Pathogens and Global Health, 2021
Kyle E. Watters, Jesse Kirkpatrick, Megan J. Palmer, Gregory D. Koblentz
Second, another challenge with genome-editing technology for treatments of biothreat agents is the high propensity of those agents to mutate. Indeed, directly targeting a pathogen creates the possibility of stimulating its intrinsic mutation rate [110]. As previously stated, many of the agents identified by the CDC as biosecurity threats are RNA viruses, which as a group tend to rapidly mutate, making vaccine and traditional drug development difficult. Targeting specific strains, or incomplete clearing of virus from the host, could result in an artificial selection for viruses with mutations or sequences that avoid CRISPR targeting. The same would be true for other pathogens as well. The mutation of bases that are critical for CRISPR targeting, such as those in the seed region of the target sequence, or bases in the protospacer adjacent motif [111] could potentially lead to inactive treatments. Care must be taken to choose guide RNAs that target the most conserved regions of a gene to avoid mutation issues, while working within the restrictions placed by the PAM sequence required by each effector. Similarly, the appearance of single nucleotide polymorphisms within the human population presents a challenge when designing prophylactic genome-editing treatments, as certain guide sequences many only result in proper targeting in a subset of the global population.
Imbalance of the intestinal virome and altered viral-bacterial interactions caused by a conditional deletion of the vitamin D receptor
Published in Gut Microbes, 2021
Jilei Zhang, Yongguo Zhang, Yinglin Xia, Jun Sun
Biosecurity and routine pathogen screening. All the animals were housed in the Biologic Resources Laboratory (BRL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and utilized in accordance with the UIC Animal Care Committee (ACC) and Office of Animal Care and Institutional Biosafety (OACIB) guidelines. The animal work was approved by the UIC Office of Animal Care (ACC15-231, ACC17-218, and ACC18-216).