Climate change, both projected and realised, impacts on livestock production – and livestock impacts on climate change, both here in Scotland and globally. Changing weather patterns can affect livestock directly, in terms of heat and cold stress, availability of food and water, and dictates what can be raised where and when. Climatic change also affects the prevalence, seasonality and geographic spread of livestock diseases.
SEFARI scientists make a significant contribution to the Scottish Government’s BVD Eradication Scheme. We inform this scheme through our unique and multi-disciplinary approach that uses epidemiological, economic, social science and molecular science to explore the wide-ranging implications of BVD. We also communicate with farmers and their vets to help them identify, understand and eradicate this viral disease. Since 2010, this scheme has increased the number of Scottish breeding holdings with negative BVD status from 72% to 91%.
Jackie is a research scientist at the Moredun Research Institute with over 30 years of experience working on livestock diseases in support of Scottish Government-funded work. Her expertise includes tissue culture, molecular biology and parasitology.
Microbes (e.g., bacteria, viruses, parasites and fungi) can become resistant to clinical or veterinary drugs (antimicrobials) that are used to treat disease. This has major consequences for how microbial diseases are managed and, therefore, how antimicrobial compounds should be used. Measuring antimicrobial usage (AMU) is a way to monitor the amount of medicines/chemicals that enter the food-chain, and the environment and this could help to reduce antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
A SEFARI Specialist Advisory Group was established in response to concerns from livestock farmers and agro-ecologists about the adverse environmental impacts of some frontline livestock worming treatments, which reach the environment either in the dung/urine of treated animals or as a result of inappropriate disposal. Information on potential environmental impacts is a prerequisite for approval of veterinary medicines in the UK, but that information is not easy to find or understand.
By engaging with school students, scientists have an opportunity to enhance learning, share their passion for their subject, demonstrate the relevance of subject areas and highlight a diversity of career opportunities.
Farming practices are evolving in response to intensification, diversification and climate change. As farm management has changed, pathogens of livestock have also adapted to optimise their reproduction and transmission opportunities. Our work, supported by Animal and Horticultural Development Board (AHDB), has focused on the control and biology of the economically important roundworm Nematodirus battus; a gut roundworm which annually threatens the health and welfare of young lambs across the UK. Our research has explored how Nematodirus behaves on commercial sheep farms.
My background is in biomedical science in diagnostic and reference laboratories and my major areas of work are currently bacteria with zoonotic potential and the prevalence of bacteria with mechanisms to resist antibiotics.
I continue to develop my interest in E. coli, working on projects relating to prevalence and persistence of this organism in Scottish farm animals.
I manage our lab here and am able to provide results directly to the rest of the Epidemiology Team for further analysis.
~~Future Farming Systems
Epidemiology Research Unit
An Lòchran
Inverness Campus
Inverness
IV2 5NA