The Library
Environmental reservoirs of bovine tuberculosis in the European badger (Meles meles)
Tools
Tools
Tools
Powell, Siân Mari (2019) Environmental reservoirs of bovine tuberculosis in the European badger (Meles meles). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
|
PDF
WRAP_Theses_Powell_2019.pdf - Submitted Version - Requires a PDF viewer. Download (19Mb) | Preview |
Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3684372
Abstract
Four years after the implementation of the current bTB strategy (2014), bTB was responsible for the premature slaughter of 44,656 cattle and estimated to cost the taxpayers and dairy industry a combined ￡120 million. Badger culling is a key component of the strategy, with at least 32,601 badgers culled in England in 2019. Despite the decrease in the number of herds classified as OTF-W across England (- 4 %), this is not necessarily reflective of an improvement in circumstances, with incidents increasing by 13% in the EA and 37% in LRA in the year to May 2019. This increase is thought to be partly attributable to the breakdown of badger social group territories and the subsequent movement of infected badgers; however, the disease dynamics within badger populations typical of cattle farms are poorly understood and much is based on speculation. Furthermore, despite the knowledge that M. bovis is capable of long-term extra-host survival, there have been no persistence studies under UK conditions using methods with higher sensitives’ than of culture, or studies conducted in naturally infected badger faeces -a hypothesised badger-to-cattle transmission mechanism. These knowledge gaps could result in errors in farm-level biosecurity design and have consequences for national disease control strategies.
For this project, the seasonal stability of M. bovis excretion levels by badger social groups was demonstrated on a chronically infected and un-culled dairy farm in the HRA of England. This information was supplemented by an assessment of environmental persistence and identified a biphasic decay rate within badger faeces. Furthermore, it determined that soil temperature is the best predictor of M. bovis persistence and that UV is an unreliable method of faecal decontamination. Finally, additional methods were optimised for the rapid differentiation of hypothetically viable M. bovis in environmental matrices by v-qPCR and immunomagnetic capture. Proposed future work will use these methods to establish the state in which M. bovis bacilli persist within the environment, with important implications for the detection of M. bovis and subsequent methods of decontamination.
| Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects: | Q Science > QL Zoology Q Science > QR Microbiology |
||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Mycobacterium bovis, Mycobacterium bovis -- Detection, Old World badgers as carriers of disease -- Great Britain, Old World badger -- Feces, Mycobacterium bovis -- Decontamination, Old World badger -- Monitoring, Tuberculosis in cattle -- Great Britain -- Prevention, Microbial contamination | ||||
| Official Date: | September 2019 | ||||
| Dates: |
|
||||
| Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
| Theses Department: | School of Life Sciences | ||||
| Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
| Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
| Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Wellington, E. M. H. (Elizabeth M. H.), 1954- | ||||
| Format of File: | |||||
| Extent: | 249 leaves : illustrations | ||||
| Language: | eng |
Request changes or add full text files to a record
Repository staff actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year
