A visualisation tool to understand disease prevention and control practices of stakeholders working along the poultry supply chain in southern India

Abstract

In this paper, we show how we developed a visualisation tool to challenge perceived notions about biosecurity on poultry farms. Veterinarians and veterinary public health professionals tend to present biosecurity measures as a universal and cost-effective solution for preventing and controlling diseases on farms. However, we illustrate how biosecurity is an ill-defined term, making it difficult to talk about or apply in practice. As a result, we demonstrate how we moved away from using the term biosecurity in our research by designing a visualisation tool. The tool was to allow us to open up dialogue around disease prevention and control, and make tangible the tacit situated practices of stakeholders working along the poultry supply chain. Our findings show that for those working along the poultry supply chain, the term biosecurity was either consistently open to interpretation, or too rigid to reflect or allow for local variations. We conclude by highlighting how our visualisation tool offers insights into why researchers must move beyond using biosecurity as a term, and instead envisage, design, and develop local solutions to prevent and control diseases on poultry farms.

Climate stress and its impact on livestock health, farming livelihoods and antibiotic use in Karnataka, India

“…Indian farmers and veterinarians are already aware of the impacts of climate change on their livestock and livelihoods and concerned about what the future holds (Cole and Desphande, 2019; Greru et al ., 2022). New tools are required that will enable them to better predict and mitigate those changes or give them confidence that their livelihoods will not face increased challenges in the short-to-mid-term future.…”

“…It is thus an important centre of animal production and research in India. The research team contained and interacted with staff from many of these institutes as part of the projects DARPI and NEOSTAR, funded under the same programme (Shaju, 2017) and visited several dozen farms during their research (e.g., Cole and Desphande, 2019; Greru et al ., 2022) conducting ethnographic observations and key stakeholder interviews with farmers, veterinarians, members of the poultry industry and policymakers.…”

“…One possible solution to mitigating the impact of climate change on livestock is the wider introduction of environmentally controlled sheds (Ambazamkandi et al, 2015), along with the energy infrastructure needed to support them; such infrastructure is currently insufficient in many rural and even peri-urban areas (Greru et al, 2022). A second consideration is a shift from livestock and poultry rearing to aquaculture, as is already being seen in northeast India, in regions likely to become more prone to heavy rainfall and flooding (Sarkhel, 2015;Rao, 2017); or shifting farming operations to different areas.…”

“…We began by attempting to understand drivers of antibiotic use and misuse in the Indian livestock sector. During ethnographic work undertaken in peri-urban areas within a 25 km radius of Bengaluru, Karnataka in southern India during 2018–19, farmers consistently spoke of challenges to their livelihoods from climate change (Cole and Desphande, 2019; Greru et al ., 2022), while veterinarians pointed to misuse of antibiotics to treat symptoms they suspected were caused or exacerbated by heat stress rather than bacterial infection (Cole and Desphande, 2019). This suggested a direct relationship between climate stress and disease which required further examination, especially as climate stress is increasingly pushing farmers from crop raising to less water-intensive poultry/livestock production, which could also exacerbate climate change issues in the long term due to land use changes and increased energy requirements (McMichael et al ., 2007).…”

Tackling AMR: a call for a(n even) more integrated and transdisciplinary approach between planetary health and earth scientists

“…At this point, it is valuable to tell the story of how we ourselves came to see the value in working together. In the process of conducting research into the drivers of antibiotic use and poor antibiotic stewardship in the Indian livestock sector in a cross-disciplinary team containing microbiologists, veterinarians, anthropologists and economists [12,22,23], we listened to farmers and veterinarians in regions of India as far apart as Karnataka in the south and Assam in North-East India who spoke, openly and implicitly during ethnographic observations, of the pressures that climate change places on their livelihoods. The changing climate has already pushed these farmers from crop farming to livestock raising and now stresses the health of their animals [12].…”