Foot-and-mouth disease and its effect on milk yield: an economic analysis on livestock holders in Pakistan.

A longitudinal study has been conducted in the provinces of Sindh, Punjab and Islamabad Capital Territory area, Pakistan, to evaluate the impact of foot-and-mouth disease on milk yield in a sample of farmers owning cattle and buffaloes. The sample consisted of 50 farms where the presence of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) virus was initially suspected on the basis of clinical signs and subsequently confirmed through either a field test or laboratory confirmation. In each farm, the total number of clinical cases was registered, and clinically diseased milking cattle and buffaloes were followed up for the next 60 days from the onset of clinical signs and the amount of milk yield measured. The average milk yield, estimated to be around 10 l per animal before the onset of FMD, decreased significantly in the 2 months following the onset of acute clinical disease. The loss of milk production in the 60 days following the onset of clinical signs was estimated to be around 220 and 201 l for cattle and buffaloes, respectively. Under the assumption that the administration of a good-quality vaccine matching circulating FMD strains could protect against clinical disease, the benefit/cost ratio for having all animals vaccinated in all 50 farms was estimated to be 5.7.

Random amplified polymorphic DNA fingerprints of the eight taxa of Trichinella and their comparison with allozyme analysis.

Eight taxa have recently been proposed as being encompassed by the genus Trichinella on the basis of allozyme and biological data. In this paper we show that an analogous 8 taxon structure for this genus results from the random amplified polymorphic DNAs (RAPDs). Five 10-mer or 20-mer primers were used under different polymerase chain reaction (PCR) conditions to produce multiband RAPD fingerprints from muscle larvae of 40 isolates of Trichinella spp. The resulting RAPD data were analysed following the numerical taxonomic approach, and the resulting classification was compared to that derived from allozyme data. The agreement found between allozymes and RAPDs, while supporting the polyspecific structure of the genus Trichinella, confirms the potential of RAPDs as a tool for the detection of cryptic species. The selected primers were tested on individual muscle larvae in an attempt to standardize a RAPD assay for the routine identification of the 8 taxa of Trichinella. Only 1 of the 5 primers yielded reproducible fingerprints from the single larvae. Using this primer, the 5 species and the 3 other taxa of the genus Trichinella can be identified in a single assay without the need for massive in vivo parasite production.