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Description of PhD

Title:  An integrative approach to the management of bovine TB in mixed wildlife-livestock systems in central Spain

Supervisor(s):  Dr Piran White (York), Dr. Mike Hutchings (SAC) and Dr. Dominic Moran (SAC)

TAC:  TBA

Funding:  Project funding by a NERC/ESRC interdisciplinary studentship. Funding for equipment also provided by the Scottish Agricultural College and IREC Wildlife Research Institute.

Description of Thesis

Bovine tuberculosis (bTB) is a disease of global importance, affecting health and economies worldwide. It is increasingly recognised that wildlife populations act as a reservoir for the disease, passing it back to livestock populations despite controls veterinary control efforts, maintaining levels of infection.

The project adopts two approaches to researching how to mitigate bTB transmission. Primarily, a better biological understanding of how the disease passes between individuals and species will be established using contact data loggers. These will record close contacts between farmed cattle, sheep and pigs, and free living wild boar and red deer. The TB status of all these individuals will be known, and as well as back ground levels in the local wildlife population.

At the same time, socio-economic work will be conducted with farmers, hunters and other stakeholders to establish what management strategies they are using that may affect disease transmission, and their opinions about how management might be improved. When wildlife disease transmission is quantified and used to identify improved management strategies, the costs of these will also be estimated and socio-economic techniques such as choice experiments used to evaluate stakeholder opinions on whether these methods might be possible and effective.

The combination of biological and socio-economic work will help to develop workable management solutions for tackling bTB.

Publications

Full publications list

Publications

• Gortazar, C., Ferroglio, E., Lutton, CE. and Acevedo, P. (2010) Disease-related conflicts in mammal conservation. Wildlife Research, 37, 668-675.
• Lutton, CE., Bohm, M., Goodman., E., Delahay, R., Ji, W., Hutchings, M. and White, P. Contact rates between Eurasian badgers (Meles meles) at different population densities: Implications for disease transmission. In Prep.

Conference Presentations

• Lutton, CE., Bohm, M., Goodman., E., Delahay, R., Ji, W., Hutchings, M. and White, P. Estimating contact rate-density relationships for Badgers (Meles meles). European Wildlife Disease Association "Healthy Wildlife, Healthy People" Conference, 2010, Vlieland, The Netherlands.
• Lutton, C., Beltran Beck, B., Vicente, J., Hutchings, M., White, P., Moran, D. and Gortazar, C. Risk factors associated with wildlife-livestock transmission of bovine tuberculosis in Spain. 8th International Symposium on Wild Boar and Other Suids. 2010, York, UK.