Poultry health constraints in smallholder village poultry systems in Northern Ghana and Central Tanzania

Gender and exposure pathways to zoonotic infections in communities at the interface of wildlife conservation areas of Uganda: A qualitative study

The changing climate and increasingly frequent environmental shocks are creating new pressures on land use and intensifying inter-species contact that might foster zoonotic disease transmission. In areas where there are complex interactions between wild/domestic animals and humans, preventing and managing zoonotic infections requires an integrated One Health approach based on interdisciplinary and multisectoral collaboration. We used a One Health approach to investigate how potential zoonotic disease exposures might be gendered based on sociocultural norms. In six conservation areas in Uganda, we focused on three zoonoses: Rift Valley Fever, Brucellosis and Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever. We conducted in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with 379 purposively selected participants. Interviews/discussions were audio recorded, transcribed, coded and analysed thematically. In all areas, women and girls were responsible for household-related work while men and boys cared for larger livestock outside of the home, with some regional variations in roles. Location-specific cultural norms differentially impacted women's and men's exposures, including male initiation rituals involving consuming raw meat and animal blood reported in one study area. The different activities performed by women and men lead to differential risks of infection, suggesting that gender-sensitive interventions are required to address the risks faced by people living in these settings.

The Control of Gastrointestinal Parasites of Village Chickens in Africa Using Ethnoveterinary Intervention: A Systematic Review

Gastrointestinal parasites have been reported to have negative effects on chickens reared in rural areas in African countries. Hence, smallholder farmers use ethnoveterinary remedies to control these parasites in village chickens. This study used online databases (ScienceDirect, PubMed, and Google Scholar) to search, gather, and review articles published between January 1990 and June 2024 where ethnoveterinary intervention was considered to control gastrointestinal parasites, following PRISMA guidelines. A total of 540 articles were generated, and only 17 articles passed the screening process and were considered for further analysis. The findings of this review indicate that ethnoveterinary remedies are used by smallholder farmers to control gastrointestinal parasites such as Ascaridia galli, Capillaria spp., Choanotaenia infundibulum, Eimeria spp., Heterakis gallinarum, and Raillietina cesticillus in village chickens. Aloe spp., Carica papaya, Musa paradisiaca, and Venonia amygdalina were reported as the most-preferred medicines, and farmers utilized different plant parts ranging from leaves (48.8%), bark and roots (12.2%), tubers (7.3%), and seeds (4.9%). These remedies are administered per os, topically, and dermally. The current review successfully summarized ethnoveterinary intervention used by smallholder farmers to control gastrointestinal parasites in chickens found in African countries. Therefore, there is a need to investigate the efficacy of these identified ethnoveterinary medicines against gastrointestinal parasites in chickens.

PoulTrans: a transformer-based model for accurate poultry condition assessment

Recent advances in deep learning have significantly enhanced the accuracy of poultry image recognition, particularly in assessing poultry conditions. However, developing intuitive decision support tools remain a significant challenge. To address this, we present PoulTrans, an innovative image captioning framework that leverages a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) integrated with a CSA_Encoder-Transformer architecture to generate detailed poultry status reports. This model incorporates visual features extracted by CNNs into the Channel Spatial Attention Segmentation Encoder (CSA_Encoder), which produces segmented channel and spatial attention outputs. To optimize multi-level attention and improve the semantic precision of the status descriptions, we introduced a Channel Spatial Memory-Guided Transformer (CSMT) and a novel PS-Loss function. The performance of PoulTrans was tested on the PSC-Captions dataset, achieving top scores of 0.501, 0.803, 4.927, 0.608, and 1.882 for the BLEU-4, ROUGE-L, CIDEr, SPICE, and Sm metrics, respectively. Comprehensive analyses and experiments have validated the effectiveness and reliability of our model, providing advanced tools for automated poultry status generation and enhancing the digital experience for poultry farmers. Our code is available at: https://github.com/kong1107800/PoulTrans .

The impact of management practices on the disease and mortality rates of broilers and layers kept by small-scale farmers in Dodoma urban district, Tanzania

The demand for chicken products in Tanzania has increased due to population growth and rising incomes. As a result, the production of broilers and layers has been promoted to fill the gap due to their high productivity. However, exotic breeds of chicken are susceptible to diseases, thus requiring good disease management practices. The current study aimed to increase production of exotic breeds of chicken in the Dodoma region, which is growing rapidly, by identifying management factors associated with disease and chicken mortality. One hundred and four households that keep broilers or layers were selected randomly from the Dodoma urban district. The households were interviewed to gather information about chicken diseases, mortality, and management practices. The proportion of sick and dead chickens per farm was determined and used in beta regression to test its association with management practices and chicken breed. The proportion of sick chickens in a flock was low when stocking density was low and in large households, but it was higher when the farmer lacked knowledge of disease management. Further, mortality rates were high when farmers lacked disease knowledge and cleaning frequency was low, and low when farmers had extensive experience in chicken production. Improvement of extension services and education programmes for poultry farmers on good disease management practices is necessary to increase the production of layers and broilers in the region.