• Question: have you prevented any zoonotic disease from spreading?

    Asked by 10ashtonr to Nicola on 14 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 14 Mar 2013:


      I’ve done quite a lot of work on a big sleeping sickness control programme in uganda – the cows have the disease, but don’t really get sick from it, but it can also pass on to people (it’s passed on by a tsetse fly). Humans will get very unwell and will die if they don’t have treatment. The control programme treated the cows for the disease and also sprayed them with insecticide – so they acted like a giant tsetse killing machine…obviously the tsetse like to feed on the cows blood, so they come along to suck their blood, but get killed by the insecticide! So overall, you have less disease in cows, which means less disease passing on to humans and also less of the tsetse fly to spread the disease! Pretty neat! I did a lot of mapping work to help them select the areas where they should use these methods, and also helped them to analyse the outcome of the control. I even went out there and did a bit of work with the cows!

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