Animals are kept in captivity for various reasons, but species with a slower pace of life may adapt to captive environments less easily, leading to welfare concerns and the need to assess stress reliably in order to develop effective interventions. Our aim was to assess welfare of semi-captive timber elephants from Myanmar by investigating the relationship between two physiological markers of stress commonly used as proxies for welfare, faecal glucocorticoid metabolite concentrations (FGM) and heterophil/lymphocyte ratios (H/L), and link these measures to changes in body condition (determined by body weight). We further assessed how robustly these two markers of stress performed in animals of different age or sex, or in different ecological contexts. We measured FGM concentrations and H/L ratios between 2016 and 2018 from 316 samples of 75 females and 49 males ranging in age from 4 to 68. We found a positive and consistent link between FGMs and H/L ratios in Asian elephants, irrespective of their sex, age, or ecological context. Our results will help to inform managers of (semi-) captive elephants about using heterophil/lymphocyte ratio data from blood smears on site as a potentially cheaper and faster alternative to determining stress than measuring faecal glucocorticoid metabolite concentrations in the laboratory.
In high income countries, childhood infections are on the rise, a phenomenon in part attributed to persistent hesitancy towards vaccines. To combat vaccine hesitancy, several countries recently made vaccinating children mandatory, but the effect of such vaccination laws on vaccination coverage remains debated and the long-term consequences are unknown. Here we quantified the consequences of vaccination laws on the vaccination coverage monitoring for a period of 63 years (1837–1899) rural Finland’s first vaccination campaign against the highly lethal childhood infection smallpox. We found that annual vaccination campaigns were focussed on children up to 1 year old, but that their vaccination coverage was low and declined with time until the start of the vaccination law, which stopped the declining trend and was associated with an abrupt coverage increase of 20 % to cover >80 % of all children. Our results indicate that vaccination laws had a long-term beneficial effect at increasing the vaccination coverage and will help public health practitioners to make informed decisions on how to act against vaccine hesitancy and optimise the impact of vaccination programmes.
Background: The burden of many infectious diseases varies seasonally and a better understanding of the drivers of infectious disease seasonality would help to improve public health interventions. For directly transmitted highly-immunizing childhood infections, the leading hypothesis is that seasonality is strongly driven by social gatherings imposed by schools, with maxima and minima during school terms and holidays respectively. However, we currently have a poor understanding of the seasonality of childhood infections in societies without schools and whether these are driven by human social gatherings. Here, we used unique nationwide data consisting of >40 epidemics over 100 years in 18th and 19th century Finland, an agricultural pre-health care society without schools, to (i) quantify the seasonality of three easily identifiable childhood infections, smallpox, pertussis and measles and (ii) test the extent to which seasonality of these diseases is driven by seasonal social gatherings. Methods: We quantified the seasonality of transmission using time series Suscpetibel-Infected-Recovery models, wavelet analyses and general additive mixed models.Results: We found that all three infections were seasonal and the seasonality patterns differed from those in industrialized societies with schools. Smallpox and measles showed high transmission in the first half of the year, but we could not associate this with seasonal human gatherings events. For pertussis, however, transmission was higher during social gathering events such as New Year and Easter.Conclusions: Our results show that the seasonality of childhood infections is more variable than previously described in other populations and indicate a pathogen-specific role of human social aggregation in driving the infectious disease dynamics.Funding: Academy of Finland (278751, 292368), Nordforsk (104910), the Ehrnrooth Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the University of Turku Foundation and the Doctoral Programme in Biology, Geography and Geology, University of Turku.
Grandmother presence can improve the number and survival of their grandchildren, but what grandmothers protect against and how they achieve it remains poorly known. Before modern medical care, infections were leading causes of childhood mortality, alleviated from the nineteenth century onwards by vaccinations, among other things. Here, we combine two individual-based datasets on the genealogy, cause-specific mortality and vaccination status of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Finns to investigate two questions. First, we tested whether there were cause-specific benefits of grandmother presence on grandchild survival from highly lethal infections (smallpox, measles, pulmonary and diarrhoeal infections) and/or accidents. We show that grandmothers decreased all-cause mortality, an effect which was mediated through smallpox, pulmonary and diarrhoeal infections, but not via measles or accidents. Second, since grandmothers have been suggested to increase vaccination coverage, we tested whether the grandmother effect on smallpox survival was mediated through increased or earlier vaccination, but we found no evidence for such effects. Our findings that the beneficial effects of grandmothers are in part driven by increased survival from some (but not all) childhood infections, and are not mediated via vaccination, have implications for public health, societal development and human life-history evolution.
In high income countries, childhood infections are on the rise, a phenomenon in part attributed to persistent hesitancy towards vaccines. To combat vaccine hesitancy, several countries recently made vaccinating children mandatory, but the effect of such vaccination laws on vaccination coverage remains debated and the long-term consequences are unknown. Here we quantified the consequences of vaccination laws on the vaccination coverage monitoring for a period of 63 years rural Finland’s first vaccination campaign against the highly lethal childhood infection smallpox. We found that annual vaccination campaigns were focussed on children up to 1 year old, but that their vaccination coverage was low and declined with time until the start of the vaccination law, which stopped the declining trend and was associated with an abrupt coverage increase of 20 % to cover >80 % of all children. Our results indicate that vaccination laws had a long-term beneficial effect at increasing the vaccination coverage and will help public health practitioners to make informed decisions on how to act against vaccine hesitancy and optimise the impact of vaccination programmes.
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