Game-Changer for African Farmers: New Project to Revolutionize Access to Veterinary Medicines
A new 3-year project supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation aims to enhance access to quality veterinary products for millions of livestock farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. The initiative, led by GALVmed, seeks to simplify and improve the regulatory processes, ensuring better availability of veterinary medicines to combat livestock diseases and boost agricultural productivity.
How much does biodiversity loss contribute to the spread of new infectious diseases?
Researchers widely agree that loss of biodiversity due to factors such as human interference with ecosystems contributes to the transmission of pathogens from animals to humans, which is known as a zoonosis. But how large is this effect? Quantifying this phenomenon is the goal of an international team of researchers headed by Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. The researchers hope their findings will contribute to identifying an elevated risk of emerging zoonoses early on. Their newly launched project, titled “Zoonosis Emergence across Degraded and Restored Forest Ecosystems” (ZOE), is receiving about four million euros in funding from the European Commission for a period of four years.
Economic growth alone is not enough to eliminate rabies
Researchers found no relationship between death rates caused by rabies and the GDP of a country and no significant association between health expenditure (% GDP) and rabies incidence. Interestingly, no association was found to occur between health expenditure and the probability of receiving PEP indicating that economic growth alone may not be sufficient in ensuring health care access.