Josephine Walker

Maasai and animals
Image by Mammal Research Unit

Josephine Walker  (Biological Sciences ), co-applicants Eric Morgan (Vet School), Kate Evans (Biological Sciences) who won funding from the Cabot Institute's annual Open Call 2012/2013 explain below how they intend to use the funding to study diseases and how they are transmitted between wildlife and livestock.

Due to changing floodwater patterns, a previously dry riverbed near the Okavango Delta area of Botswana has water flowing in it again. This source of water has caused wildlife, pastoralists, and their livestock to move to the area, potentially leading to conflict and the transmission of diseases between wildlife and livestock, including Foot and Mouth Disease, gastrointestinal parasites, and tick-borne diseases.

This environment provides us with a unique opportunity to study disease in the context of a complex social-ecological system. In this project, we will use participatory epidemiology approaches to record local knowledge of livestock diseases including the role of wildlife in transmission and confirm presence of parasites by collection of ticks and fecal samples from the environment.

Determining which diseases are important to the local people and how wildlife are perceived is the first step towards a larger project that aims to develop veterinary disease interventions targeted at animals with a high risk of transmission.

Disease and parasite burden will be dependent on environmental factors such as climate, including the risk of drought, as well as wildlife and livestock movements and contact.

We will learn about diseases of importance from local livestock owners using tools such as semi-structured interviews and the participatory development of maps and seasonal calendars, and compare this to parasites found by traditional methods.

Overall, we aim to build on local knowledge to gain an understanding of disease transmission in the area, increase the resilience of the local communities to outbreaks of livestock disease, and work towards conservation goals by mitigating human-wildlife conflict.