Rationalising development of classification systems describing livestock production systems for disease burden analysis within the Global Burden of Animal Diseases programme.

The heterogeneity that exists across the global spectrum of livestock production means that livestock productivity, efficiency, health expenditure and health outcomes vary across production systems. To ensure that burden of disease estimates are specific to the represented livestock population and people reliant upon them, livestock populations need to be systematically classified into different types of production system, reflective of the heterogeneity across production systems. This paper explores the data currently available of livestock production system classifications and animal health through a scoping review as a foundation for the development of a framework that facilitates more specific estimates of livestock disease burdens. A top-down framework to classification is outlined based on a systematic review of existing classification methods and provides a basis for simple grouping of livestock at global scale. The proposed top-down classification framework, which is dominated by commodity focus of production along with intensity of resource use, may have less relevance at the sub-national level in some jurisdictions and will need to be informed and adapted with information on how countries themselves categorize livestock and their production systems. The findings in this study provide a foundation for analysing animal health burdens across a broad level of production systems. The developed framework will fill a major gap in how livestock production and health are currently approached and analysed.

Livestock health and disease economics: a scoping review of selected literature.

Animal diseases in production and subsistence environments have the potential to negatively affect consumers, producers, and economies as a whole. A growing global demand for animal sourced food requires safe and efficient production systems. Understanding the burden of animal disease and the distribution of burden throughout a value chain informs policy that promotes safe consumption and efficient markets, as well as providing more effective pathways for investment. This paper surveys existing knowledge on the burden of animal disease across economic categories of production, prevention and treatment, animal welfare, and trade and regulation. Our scoping review covers 192 papers across peer-reviewed journals and reports published by organizations. We find there exists a gap in knowledge in evaluating what the global burdens of animal diseases are and how these burdens are distributed in value chains. We also point to a need for creating an analytical framework based on established methods that guides future evaluation of animal disease burden, which will provide improved access to information on animal health impacts.

[The IBD-Control questionnaire: German translation and validation of the standardized questionnaire for Patient Reported Outcome Measurement in inflammatory bowel disease]. / Der IBD-Control-Fragebogen: Deutsche Übertragung und Validierung des standardisierten Fragebogens zur Messung des Outcomes aus Patientensicht bei chronisch entzündlichen Darmerkrankungen.

BACKGROUND: Subjectively perceived results of treatment will be in the center of defining treatment success on the way to value-based and patient-centered health care. Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) serve as an instrument to measure treatment success. In inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), measuring treatment success from a patient's point of view is performed with the validated IBD-Control questionnaire. Because the IBD-Control questionnaire has not been published in German yet, the translation and validation of the IBD-Control in the German-speaking part of Switzerland was necessary before use. METHODS: We have translated the English original version of the IBD-Control questionnaire into German in a state-of-the-art procedure of "forward-backward translation" and validated the translated IBD-Control questionnaire with 154 patients with Crohn's disease or with ulcerative colitis. RESULTS: Professional health care and translation experts have contributed to the translation of the IBD-Control into German. The IBD-Control-D is an accepted questionnaire. Spearmans Rho showed high consistency between the IBD-Control-8-Subscore and the IBD-Control-VAS-Score (r=0.632). The disease activity in the past 6 months highly correlated with the IBD-8 subscore (r=0.640) as well as with the IBD-Control-VAS-Score (r=0.622). The IBD-Control-8-Subscore highly correlated with the Harvey Bradshaw Index (r=-0.620) and the partial Mayo Score (r=-0.679), as well as the IBD-Control-VAS-Score with the Harvey Bradshaw Index (r=-0.484) and the Mayo Score (r=-0.435), showing sufficient construct validity. The result is the German version of the IBD-Control, the IBD-Control-D, published here. CONCLUSION: The original English version is a valid instrument, and its use has proven to be a suitable instrument in German-speaking areas to make the subjective feeling of illness and treatment outcome measurable.

Household Macronutrient Prices and Livestock Health in Western Kenya.

Understanding food insecurity issues is in part contingent on understanding food consumption and its costs. We develop estimates of protein, lipid, and carbohydrate macronutrient consumption from household food consumption in western Kenya. We then calculate the shadow price per gram of macronutrient consumption as a share-weighted expense-consumption ratio. Using household bovine, goat, and sheep livestock health observations linked to each household, we analyze the association between livestock illness and macronutrient prices. We find that on average carbohydrates have a 75% budget share, with protein at 14% and lipids at 11%. Average macronutrient shadow prices are 0.0936 Ksh/g for carbohydrates, 0.4373 Ksh/g for protein, and 0.5938 Ksh/g for lipids. Average village-level livestock illness occurrences have significant effects on macronutrient shadow prices. Increasing average bovine illness at the village level by one additional case results in a marginal increase of the shadow prices of protein, lipids, and carbohydrates by 0.11, 0.12, and 0.03 (Ksh/g), respectively. Associated marginal impacts of sheep illness occurrence on protein, lipid, and carbohydrate shadow prices (Ksh/g) are 0.1405, 0.182, and 0.0455, respectively. This exploratory analysis provides empirical evidence that livestock illness is associated with increased macronutrient shadow prices, and hence the costs of available energy consumption. These results help guide policy instruments focused on market forces of nutrient consumption and its relationship with livestock health in undernourished areas with smallholder farming systems.