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Monitoring and intervention strategies for bluetongue virus epidemics in rural India (A648)

 
This project takes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding epidemiology of the ruminant disease, bluetongue (BT), in India, with a view to developing tools for accurate risk assessment and appropriate, low-cost vector control. In India bluetongue virus (BTV) imposes the major constraint on sheep rearing - with subsistence farming communities in the south being most severely affected due to periodic, monsoon-driven hyperendemic outbreaks. Vector control is currently the only option for disease management, since co-circulation of many BTV strains and expense of vaccines render protective immunisation unachievable. Our team combines specialists in veterinary medicine, entomology, chemical ecology, ecological modelling and remote sensing with long term surveillance datasets and field-based experiments. This will deliver a number of things for India: (a) the first assessment of key midge vectors involved in transmission; (b) an in-depth understanding of the environmental conditions that drive midge population increases and that, in turn, drive the timing and locations of BT epidemics and hyper-epidemics; (c) a thorough evaluation of current and novel technology for vector surveillance and control. These will be integrated into a framework for risk assessment of BTV epidemics and design of optimal strategies for low cost vector control.

IAH Principal Investigator: Dr Simon Carpenter

UK Collaborators:
Professor John Pickett, Chemical Ecology Group, Rothamsted Research
Dr James Logan, Chemical Ecology Group, Rothamsted Research
Dr Michael Birkett, Chemical Ecology Group, Rothamsted Research
Dr Beth Purse, Biodiversity Programme, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology
Professor David Rogers, University of Oxford

Overseas Collaborators:
Professor Gaya Prasad, Animal Biotechnology Department, Haryana Agricultural College

Country involved: India
Duration: 36 months
     

 
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