Many thanks to Susan MacMillan of ILRI for facilitating one of the authors of a paper we nibbled, Dr Delia Grace, to respond to a couple of queries we had yesterday:
As you pointed out, the data on livestock is SSA is very poor. As a result our reasoning was deductive rather than inductive, based on evidence on the links between system change, genetic homogeneity, population density, transmission opportunities, species diversity etc. on disease emergence and endemicity; it was also based on our own experience (between us multiple decades) of livestock epidemiology in Africa. I can’t speak to use in FARA but the thinking around hot and cold spots is feeding into the CGIAR Consortium Research Program on Agriculture, Nutrition and Health. We are hoping this “megaprogram” will give us the opportunity of ground-truthing and quantifying these disease dynamics trajectories.
We really appreciate it when people respond to what we say here. We know they don’t have to. We know they have better things to do. We really appreciate it very much.