LOCAL

MN Board of Animal Health CWD Audit

According to the newly published evaluation by the Minnesota office of legislative auditor, The Minnesota Board of Animal Health has failed to adequately enforce state chronic waisting disease regulation of deer and elk farms in some instances. The board has, however, already improved its deer and elk program over the past several months to some extent.

Some fo the key shortcomings found by the auditor include that the BAH is smaller than other states’ animal health boards and does not include a public member and that BAH does not systematically analyze whether producers submit CWD testing samples for all deer and elk that they report as deceased. It also mentions that the law does not require that deer and elk identification tags are read regularly. As such, the inventories producers submit may not accurately reflect the animals on the farm, which could complicate the investigation that BAH must conduct if CWD is discovered among farmed cervids.

Key recommendations of the report include increasing the size of the board, adding at least one member of the general public, clarifying expectations of whether and how often producers must verify their herd inventory on an animal by-animal basis, systematically analysing CWD-testing compliance and appropriately penalising those producers who fail to submit CWD testing samples.

Minnesota Office of Legislative Auditor

NATIONAL

Hepatitis A is out

State and county officials continue to alert the public about possible exposure to Hepatitis A from food service employees who have worked while being infected. While hepatitis A outbreaks are often linked to imported fresh food and homeless populations, this year more attention has been on infected restaurant workers spreading the disease. Kentucky and Michigan have been battling such cases for some time and more resent warnings have come from Arkansas and Indiana.

Food-related outbreaks are usually associated with contamination of food during preparation by an infected food handler. Food handlers are generally not ill when they are at peak infectivity, which is when the highest levels of the virus are present in the stool of an infected individual. This occurs two weeks before illness begins. Each year about 8% of adults who have hepatitis are identified as food handlers, indicating that thousands of food workers have the disease.

Hepatitis A is highly contagious and spreads through contact with an infected person and through consuming tainted food or water. It often causes flu-like symptoms, abdominal pain and jaundice. The disease is however easily prevented through proper hand hygiene practices and vaccination. The CDC recommends hepatitis vaccinations to any person traveling to an area where the disease is common.

Food Safety News
Center for Disease Control and Prevention 

GLOBAL

Stuck with malaria

The global progress in fighting Malaria seems to be stalling. While increases in funding and global coordination have led to a 47 percent drop in malaria deaths worldwide and an 18 percent decrease in cases since 2000, progress has unfortunately halted in the past years. In 2016, there were an estimated 216 million cases of malaria, an increase of about 5 million cases over 2015. Deaths reached 445,000, a similar number to the previous year.

One of the challenges in fighting the parasite is the emergence of parasite resistance to antimalarial medicines. Over the past 50 years, Plasmodium falciparum has developed resistance against all antimalarial drugs used against it: chloroquine, sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine, quinine, piperaquine and mefloquine. As with Antimicrobial resistance, the key to parasitic resistance is not to concentrate solely on treatment, but to look beyond it: The more efficient we can be with prevention the less antimalarial drugs we need to use and the less the parasites have a change to develop resistance.

Prevention is not easy though, as to make sustainable change a complex web of issues needs to be addressed, including poverty, poor sanitation, weak health systems, limited disease surveillance capabilities, natural disasters, armed conflict, migration and climate change. A few practical, easy and quick prevention methods are a good place to start though - insecticide-treated mosquito nets and indoor residual spraying, both recommended by the WHO. Unfortunately, the malaria mosquitos are also becoming resistant to insecticides, so while we can start here, we need to get to the root cause - poverty - soon.

World Health Organiztion
The Febs Journal