Five AGRIPIR projects for introducing new technologies into highland agriculture

Five projects for introducing new technologies into highland agriculture will be launched as a result of the European cross-border cooperation AGRIPIR project. In concrete, plans are being drawn up for the teledetection of diseases amongst animals, the prevention of attacks by wolves and other predators, there mote monitoring of herd activity, and the self-supply of energy to remote holdings, as well asa “virtual herder” for controlling herds at a distance.

The European AGRIPIR project, in which various partners on both sides of the Pyrenees have been working for over three years in order to modernise agriculture and animal herding in mountainous areas, concluded with a two-day seminar in Bidart (in Labourd, in the continental Basque Country) . Five innovative projects to introduce new technologies onPyrenees farm-holdings were presented. The seminar was held on 11 and 12 ofDecember, in the presence of a number of authorities, outstanding amongst whom was the recently appointed European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, Mr. Phil Hogan from Ireland.

In concrete, this network of exchange and experimentation for the revaluation and enhancement of agriculture in the Pyrenees has given rise to four new projects:

- Power Box: developing an energy kit made up of various supply sources and that guarantees energy autonomy for mountain herders and shepherds in zones of difficult access in order to carry out their daily tasks.

- Mastech: developing technologies based on nuclear magnetic resonance, thermography, proteomics (the study of proteins) and measures based on behaviour andphysiologyfor the early detection amongst sheep, goat and cattle herds of mastitis processes (the most frequent diseases that affect the dairy industry worldwide).

- Live-Pre Life: improving the co-existence of large predators and herds in mountain areas, through developing intelligent fencing, methods for the early detection of attacks, and active systems to drive away wolves and other potentially dangerous animals.

- Cowmon: developing an open, low-cost system with unlimited autonomy for monitoring herd activity over large expanses of terrain and to provide new services linked to animal welfare and tothe productivity of farmlands.

A pilot project known as e-Pasto has also already been developed, involving a “virtual herder” to control herds remotely, using latest-generation geo-location devices fitted to the collars of the animals.

Source: Elhuyar Fundazioa

UT Institute of Agriculture Launches New Branding Campaign

There’s no mistaking the system colors of the University of Tennessee. Everywhere you look, there’s plenty of orange.

However, the UT Institute of Agriculture (UTIA) is adding new splashes of color to the landscape, along with redesigned logos for the Institute and its four units. All feature the orange “UT” system icon that is so widely recognized. In addition to the new theme colors, UTIA is adopting a new tagline that will serve as its branding promise: Real. Life. Solutions.

“We believe the Institute of Agriculture’s new logo and brand promise best represent our statewide presence in all 95 counties of Tennessee,” says UTIA Chancellor Larry Arrington. “Visual branding is important when telling the story of an organization, and our new look and message will help us better communicate our land-grant mission.”

UTIA’s new logo features the traditional orange with a slate font. UT Extension features a green or “pasture” color. UT AgResearch is represented by a dark blue known as “bluff.” The UT College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources has a blue “azure” color, and the UT College of Veterinary Medicine features a gray “granite” color. The brand promise will be featured prominently on printed and electronic materials, and be a part of apparel and signage around Tennessee. Images of the new logos can be found on the UTIA Marketing website: ag.tennessee.edu/marketing

"Our brand promise speaks to what the faculty, staff, students, alumni and supporters do every day, and that is working to find answers to society's many challenges," says Lisa Stearns, vice chancellor for UTIA Marketing and Communications. "Providing real life solutions that make a positive impact in our state and beyond is our commitment."

The campaign was developed by UTIA’s Marketing and Communications unit over the past year. It included a statewide audit of printed and electronic materials, and consulting an expert to guide a discussion on branding architecture. In addition, the team worked with the UT System Marketing and Communications Office to make sure the direction in which UTIA was moving would help promote the UT brand.

The Institute will begin phasing in the new logos and brand promise immediately, and the goal is to have full implementation by the end of 2015 across Tennessee.

The UT Institute of Agriculture provides instruction, research and outreach through the UT College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, the UT College of Veterinary Medicine, UT AgResearch, including its system of 10 research and education centers, and UT Extension offices in every county in the state.

Source: UTIA

Mushroom extract, AHCC, helpful in treating HPV

Judith A. Smith, Pharm.D. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

A Japanese mushroom extract appears to be effective for the eradication of human papillomavirus (HPV), according to a pilot clinical trial at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) Medical School.

The results were presented at the 11th International Conference of the Society for Integrative Oncology in Houston today by principal investigator Judith A. Smith, Pharm.D., associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the UTHealth Medical School.

Ten HPV-positive women were treated orally with the extract, AHCC (active hexose correlated compound) once daily for up to six months. Five achieved a negative HPV test result -- three with confirmed eradication after stopping AHCC -- with the remaining two responders continuing on the study.

Currently, there is no effective medicine or supplement to treat HPV, which is associated with more than 99 percent of cervical cancer cases. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, several other cancers are related to HPV, including 95 percent of anal cancer, 60 percent of oropharyngeal, 65 percent of vaginal cancer, 50 percent of vulvar cancer and 35 percent of penile cancer.

AHCC is a readily available nutritional supplement that works to improve the innate immune system. Human and preclinical studies have shown that AHCC increases the number and/or activity of Natural Killer (NK) cells, dendritic cells and cytokines, which help the body fight off infections and block tumor growth.

"The results are very encouraging," Smith said. "We were able to determine that at least three months of treatment is necessary but some need to extend that to six months. Since AHCC is a nutritional supplement with no side effects and other immune modulating benefits, we will be planning on using six months of treatment in our phase II clinical study to have consistent study treatment plan. This confirms our earlier preclinical research."

Smith is director of UTHealth's Women's Health Integrative Medicine Research Team, which focuses on the safe and effective use of nutritional and herbal supplements with pharmacologic modalities as it relates to women's health and cancer.

This research is proceeding to a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase II clinical trial which has just begun at UTHealth, Smith said. For more information on enrolling in the trial, go to http://go.uth.edu/judithresearch.

Source: University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

A lab in your pocket: Using CAD to load dozens of tests on a lab-on-a-chip

Two computer-generated configurations for routing a droplet through multiple lab-on-a-chip diagnostic tests, many more than are currently possible using manual methods. The software was developed by Michigan Tech's Shiyan Hu and Chen Liao. The figure is reproduced with permission of IEEE Transactions on NanoBioscience. Credit: Chen Liao and Shiyan Hu

When you get sick, your physician may take a sample of your blood, send it to the lab and wait for results. In the near future, however, doctors may be able to run those tests almost instantly on a piece of plastic about the size of credit card.

These labs-on-a-chip would not only be quick -- results are available in minutes -- but also inexpensive and portable. They could be used miles from the nearest medical clinic to test for anything from HIV to diabetes. But as powerful as they may be, they could be far better, says Shiyan Hu, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan Technological University.

Generally, a lab-on-a-chip (LOC) can run no more than a test or two. That's because the chips are designed manually, says Hu. If the LOC were made using computer-aided design, you could run dozens of tests with a single drop of blood.

"In a very short time, you could test for many conditions," he said. "This really would be an entire lab on a chip."

With PhD student Chen Liao, Hu has taken the first step. "We have developed software to design the hardware," he said. Their work focuses on routing the droplet of blood or other fluid through each test on the chip efficiently while avoiding any chip contamination.

"It has taken us four years to do the software, but to manufacture the LOC would be inexpensive," Hu said. "The materials are very cheap, and the results are more accurate than a conventional lab's."

Ultimately, Hu aims to fabricate their own biochip using their software.

Their work was featured on the cover of the March edition of IEEE Transactions on Nanobiosciences and described in the article "Physical-Level Synthesis for Digital Lab-On-a-Chip Considering Variation, Contamination, and Defect." Liao was partially supported by an A. Richard Newton Graduate Scholarship, awarded by the Design Automation Conference.

Source: Michigan Technological University

Computational model: Ebola could infect more than 1.4 million people by end of January 2015

The Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute modeled the rate of infections and how interventions would affect the rate.
Credit: Source: CDC / Image courtesy of Virginia Tech

The Ebola epidemic could claim hundreds of thousands of lives and infect more than 1.4 million people by the end of January, according to a statistical forecast released this week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC forecast supports the drastically higher projections released earlier by a group of scientists, including epidemiologists with the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, who modeled the Ebola spread as part of a National Institutes of Health-sponsored project called Midas, short for Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study.

The effort is also supported by the federal Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

Before the scientists released results, the outbreak in West Africa was expected to be under control in nine months with only about 20,000 total cases. But modeling showed 20,000 people could be infected in just a single month.

The predictions could change dramatically if public health efforts become effective, but based on the virus's current uncontrolled spread, numbers of people infected could skyrocket.

"If the disease keeps spreading as it has been we estimate there could be hundreds of thousands of cases by the end of the year in Liberia alone," said Bryan Lewis, a computational epidemiologist with the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute.

Lewis and his fellow researchers use a combination of models to predict outcomes of the epidemic.

The agent-based models are adaptive, evolving as more information is fed into them to provide an accurate forecast.

Pharmaceutical intervention, which is still on the horizon, is proving less effective in the models than supportive care and personal protection equipment for health care workers.

"The work with Ebola is not an isolated event," said Christopher Barrett, the executive director of the institute. "This research is part of a decades-long effort largely funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to build a global synthetic population that will allow us to ask questions about our world and ourselves that we have never been able to ask before, and to use those answers to prevent or quickly intervene during a crisis."

Barrett and other institute leaders updated U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine and Virginia Tech President Timothy Sands about the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Lab's role in analyzing the Ebola outbreak at the Virginia Tech Research Center in Arlington on Tuesday morning. That afternoon in Blacksburg they briefed staff members from U.S. Sen. Mark Warner's office.

A university-level Research Institute of Virginia Tech, the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute was established in 2000 with an emphasis on informatics of complex interacting systems scaling the microbiome to the entire globe. It helps solve challenges posed to human health, security, and sustainability. Headquartered at the Blacksburg campus, the institute occupies 154,600 square feet in research facilities, including state-of-the-art core laboratory and high-performance computing facilities, as well as research offices in the Virginia Tech Research Center in Arlington, Virginia.

Source: Virginia Tech

Doctor who survived Ebola received experimental drug treatment

On 28 September, 2014, a 38-year old doctor, who was in charge of an Ebola virus treatment unit in Lakka, Sierra Leone, developed a fever and diarrhea. He tested positive for the virus on the same day. He was placed on a ventilator and on kidney dialysis, and was given antibiotics together with a 3-day course of an experimental drug called FX06 -- a fibrin-derived peptide that has been shown to reduce vascular leakage and its complications in mice with Dengue hemorrhagic shock. Credit: © nito / Fotolia

On 28 September, 2014, the 38-year old doctor, who was in charge of an Ebola virus treatment unit in Lakka, Sierra Leone, developed a fever and diarrhea. He tested positive for the virus on the same day. The doctor was airlifted to Frankfurt University Hospital on the 5th day of his illness and admitted to a specialized isolation unit.

Within 72 hours of admission he developed signs of vascular leakage and severe multi-organ failure, including the lungs, kidneys, and gastrointestinal tract. He was placed on a ventilator and on kidney dialysis, and was given antibiotics together with a 3-day course of an experimental drug called FX06 -- a fibrin-derived peptide that has been shown to reduce vascular leakage and its complications in mice with Dengue hemorrhagic shock.

A marked improvement in vascular and respiratory function was seen under the combined measures of intensive care and drug treatment. After a 30-day observation period, no Ebola virus genetic material was detected in the patient's blood plasma. The patient was released from hospital and is now with his family.
"Even though the patient was critically ill, we were able to support him long enough for his body to start antibody production and for the virus to be cleared by his body's defenses," explains Dr Wolf.

"In terms of improving treatment for Ebola patients, we have shown how intensive care medicine can successfully be applied under strict isolation conditions," adds senior author Professor Zacharowski, head of the Department of Anaesthetics and Intensive Care Medicine at Frankfurt University Hospital."
The authors conclude by calling for FX06 to be evaluated in clinical trials.

Source: The Lancet

Infectious prion protein discovered in urine of patients with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

Claudio Soto, Ph.D., in one of his labs at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). Credit: Image courtesy of University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

The misfolded and infectious prion protein that is a marker for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease – linked to the consumption of infected cattle meat – has been detected in the urine of patients with the disease by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) Medical School.

The results of the international study, led by Claudio Soto, Ph.D., professor of neurology at the UTHealth Medical School, will be published in the Aug. 7 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans and bovine spongiform encephalopathy in animals – also known as Mad Cow disease – are fatal neurodegenerative disorders. There are currently no noninvasive tools available to diagnose the disease and there are no treatments.

Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease occurs worldwide at a rate of around 1 new case per million people per year. The variant form is a new disease occurring in people who either ate the beef of cows with bovine spongiform encephalopathy or, in the case of three patients in the United Kingdom, received blood transfusions from asymptomatic infected donors.

The international team of researchers analyzed urine samples from 68 patients with sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, 14 patients with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, four patients with genetic prion diseases, 50 patients with other neurodegenerative diseases, 50 patients with nondegenerative neurologic diseases and 52 healthy persons.

Soto’s laboratory used a protein misfolding cyclic amplification assay, invented in the lab, which mimics the prion replication process in vitro that occurs in prion disease. The misfolded prion proteins were detected in the urine of 13 of 14 patients with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The single patient whose urine was negative had been receiving an experimental treatment of pentosan polysulfate directly into the brain. No misfolded prion proteins were detected in the urine of any the other study subjects, including the patients who had sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

“What could be less invasive than detecting this disease in urine? The fact that we were able to detect just the variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease form in the urine is very important. This could lead to the development of commercial technology for diagnosis as well as to determine the safety of donated blood and urinary products,” said Soto, who is the director of The George and Cynthia Mitchell Center for Research in Alzheimer’s disease and Related Brain Disorders, and founder of Amprion Inc, a biotech company developing the cyclic amplification technology for commercial application.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease affects younger patients, who have a median age of 28 at death, compared to sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease with a median age of 68. Most patients, after diagnosis of either form, live less than a year before death.

As of June 2, 2014, 177 of 229 people in the world with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease were from the United Kingdom. A 2013 study published in the British Medical Journal has estimated that approximately 30,000 people in the United Kingdom might be carriers of the variant form of the disease.

“This study reports, for the first time, the detection of the abnormal prion protein in the urine from patients with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease using the protein misfolding amplification technique pioneered by Dr. Claudio Soto,” said co-author James W. Ironside, FMedSci, FRSE, professor of clinical neuropathology at the National CJD Research and Surveillance Unit at the University of Edinburgh. “This has great potential to allow the development of a highly sensitive and specific non-invasive test that can be used for the diagnosis of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and potentially as a screening tool for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease infection in asymptomatic individuals, which is a topic of current interest in the United Kingdom.”

Source: University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

Targeted culling of deer controls disease with little effect on hunting

A new study found that the targeted culling of deer prevents the rampant spread of chronic wasting disease to healthy deer.

Chronic wasting disease, the deer-equivalent of mad cow disease, has crept across the U.S. landscape from west to east. It appeared first in captive mule deer in Colorado in the late 1960s. By 1981, it had escaped to the wild. It reached the Midwest by 2002. Little is known about its potential to infect humans.

The effort to keep chronic wasting disease in check in Illinois is a success, report researchers Nohra Mateus-Pinilla, left, a wildlife veterinary epidemiologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey; U. of I. animal sciences professor Jan Novakofski; and postdoctoral researcher Michelle Green.

Now researchers at the University of Illinois offer a first look at the long-term effectiveness of the practice of culling deer in areas affected by CWD to keep the disease in check. Their study appears in the journal Preventive Veterinary Medicine.

Each year, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources tests 7,000 (hunted, culled or incidentally killed) deer for CWD infection, conducts aerial surveillance to see where deer congregate and sends in sharpshooters to cull deer at the sites with disease, said Jan Novakofski, a professor of animal sciences at the University of Illinois and an author of the study.

"We know a lot about how far deer typically move," he said. "If they're sick, they're going to spread the disease that far. So if you find a deer that's sick, you draw that small circle and you shoot there."

Novakofski called this approach "a textbook scientific strategy for control. You reduce contact and you reduce the spread of infection with the smallest overall impact on healthy deer."

He and his colleagues at the Illinois Natural History Survey (part of the Prairie Research Institute at the U. of I.) found that the strategy worked: The prevalence of CWD in tested Illinois deer remained at about 1 percent from 2002 to 2012.

The team also found that hunters were killing more deer each year in each region of the state (north, central and south) regardless of CWD and CWD management. Statewide, the number of deer killed by hunters went from 147,830 in 2001, before the appearance of CWD, to 181,451 in 2012. The only exception: Two counties out of 10 with cases of CWD saw a reduction in hunter harvest over the same period.

"We wanted to know whether Illinois hunters have fewer deer to hunt now than they did before CWD," said Nohra Mateus-Pinilla, a wildlife veterinary epidemiologist at the INHS who led the study with postdoctoral researcher Mary Beth Manjerovic. "We found that hunter harvest has increased, and the prevalence of CWD has been maintained at low levels for 10 years in Illinois."

This finding answers a long-time complaint by some hunters that the culling of deer makes it harder for them to find deer to shoot, Novakofski said.
"Since 2001, hunter harvest of deer has increased similarly in the northern region of Illinois, where CWD occurs, and the rest of the state, where there is no disease or sharpshooting," he said.

In the two Illinois counties with fewer deer, "the reductions were 11 to 20 percent," Manjerovic said.

The team compared the Illinois experience with that of Wisconsin, which changed its CWD-management strategy from one that relied on culling to one that consisted primarily of allowing hunters to thin deer herds, the researchers said. Wisconsin saw a striking increase of infection in CWD-tested deer after it did that, the team found.

"In the early years in Wisconsin, (CWD prevalence) was still about 1 percent, just as it was in Illinois," Manjerovic said. "Then the strategy changed. Since 2007, CWD prevalence has increased to about 5 percent."

"We can't find an environmental or other variable that explains the increase in prevalence except a change in management," Novakofski said.

The numbers may not seem alarming to some, said postdoctoral researcher and co-author Michelle Green. But the trend is of concern, she said.

"CWD is a prion disease (like mad cow disease) and it's 100 percent fatal. 
There's no current way that we can actually make the deer better, so it's important that we keep it from spreading too far throughout the population," she said. "And then there's also the connection to mad cow disease. We don't have enough information yet to really understand what the impact to human health could be."

"We all hope that there is never a case of chronic wasting disease in humans. We all hope that it never spreads to people or agricultural animals," Novakofski said. "If it ever does, the investment in maintaining prevalence at a low level in Illinois will be repaid a thousand-fold."

Source: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Scrapie could breach the species barrier

Scrapie is a neurodegenerative disease that has been known for centuries and which affects sheep and goats. Credit: INRA/Florent Giffard

INRA scientists have shown for the first time that the pathogens responsible for scrapie in small ruminants (prions) have the potential to convert the human prion protein from a healthy state to a pathological state. In mice models reproducing the human species barrier, this prion induces a disease similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. These primary results published in Nature Communications on 16 December 2014, stress the necessity to reassess the transmission of this disease to humans.

Scrapie is a neurodegenerative disease that has been known for centuries and which affects sheep and goats. Similar to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease, scrapie is caused by a transmissible pathogen protein called prion.

However, and contrary to BSE[1], epidemiological studies have never been able to establish a link between this disease and the occurrence of prion diseases in humans. "Risks of transmitting scrapie to humans (zoonose) were hitherto considered negligible because of the species barrier that naturally prevents prion propagation between species," said Olivier 

Andreoletti, INRA scientist who led the present study.

Researchers at INRA studied the permeability of the human transmission barrier to pathogens responsible for scrapie, using animal models specifically developed for this purpose. This approach previously allowed the confirmation of the zoonotic nature of prions responsible for BSE in cows and of the variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans (vCJD).

Unexpectedly, in these rodent models, certain pathogens responsible for scrapie were able to cross the transmission barrier. Moreover, the pathogens that propagated through this barrier were undistinguishable from the prions causing the sporadic form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD). This data suggest a potential link between the occurrence of certain sCJD and these animal prions.

"Since CJD is scarce, about 1 case per million and per year, and incubation periods are usually long -several decades- it is extremely difficult for epidemiological studies to try and make this link," explains Olivier Andreoletti.

In their conclusions, the authors stress the fact that CJD cases are rare though scrapie has been circulating for centuries in small ruminants for which we eat the meat. Even if in future studies scrapie is finally confirmed to have a zoonotic potential, the authors consider that this disease does not constitute a new major risk for public health.

Source: INRA-France

The business-minded veterinarian

Veterinarians are needed not only to treat our pets and livestock, but in a broader context, to help with zoonotic disease maintenance. Credit: Image courtesy of Kansas State University Research and Extension

Animals can teach us more about the human body than we might realize. Crack open New York Times bestseller "Zoobiquity," and you'll learn about a human cardiologist's experiences at the Los Angeles Zoo that allowed her to more closely connect human and animal medicine. Even in the first chapter -- Dr. House, Meet Doctor Dolittle -- author Barbara Natterson-Horowitz reveals how doctors and veterinarians could learn from each other to effectively diagnose and treat all species.

Indeed, veterinarians are needed not only to treat our pets and livestock, but in a broader context, to help with zoonotic disease maintenance. The interaction between animals and humans secures the continuous demand for the profession, and the fewer veterinarians we have, the larger potential for catastrophic disease, according to Michael Dicks, director of the economics division for the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA).

Although the profession is needed, Dicks said financial struggles do exist, especially for those beginning to practice. Many veterinarians who are just starting out find that they need to make enough money to pay off their high educational debt while trying to make a living, which can pose a major challenge.

According to Kansas State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, the average debt reported by its 2014 graduates was $170,380, and graduates in 2013 had similar debt at $170,919.

The average practice salary reported by 2014 K-State graduates was $64,678 and for 2013 graduates, $63,294. For those practicing outside of Kansas, the average starting salaries were a bit higher at $66,057 for 2014 graduates and $66,939 for those who graduated in 2013.

"The downturn of the economy impacted veterinary medicine and what graduates could earn in their first year," said Roger Fingland, executive associate dean for K-State's College of Veterinary Medicine and director of the Veterinary Health Center. "It is important to educate people who want to be veterinarians about the financial realities. But, I think the value of being a veterinarian has to always be in the discussion."

Seeking opportunities

Dicks, a veteran agricultural economist, said the objective of the AVMA's economics division is to find ways to enhance the lifelong value of a veterinary degree. Understanding the market for veterinary services and how individual veterinary practices make money are important components that add value.

The biggest area of demand in veterinary medicine is working with companion animals, or pets, which accounts for about six out of 10 practicing veterinarians, he said. Food animal veterinarians, those who work with cattle, sheep and pigs as examples, account for one out of 10. Other veterinarians might choose mixed animal practice or work in zoos, animal hospitals, the education field or other industries.

Scholarship opportunities are available for students in many interest areas, particularly for those who want to work in rural areas and seek mixed animal practice or large animal practice, including food animals and other livestock. Fingland said at K-State, rural scholarship recipients receive $25,000 a year if they intend to practice in a Kansas county that is declared rural. Most counties in Kansas have a rural designation.

If the students take the scholarship and don't practice in a rural area, however, they have to pay that money back, he said. To his knowledge, no students have had to pay the money back, but some graduates will find that some rural areas don't have enough animals to support a full-time veterinarian. Or, perhaps the environment will not allow the veterinarian to charge the going rate for various services.

"I believe there is a need for large animal and mixed animal practitioners in some rural areas," Fingland said. "Need means there are consumers in that area who perceive that they need veterinary services. Needing veterinary services and having an environment that financially supports veterinary services are two different things. Some communities can't financially support the service."

Certain aspects of veterinary medicine are different than others, and veterinarians can choose certain avenues of practice to potentially increase their salaries. Industry veterinarians typically have higher earning potential than mixed animal practitioners, Fingland said.

Like human doctors, veterinarians can specialize as cardiologists, surgeons, internists and radiologists, as examples. Veterinarian specialists tend to make higher salaries, Fingland said, but they also have to go through much more training than general practitioners. Practice ownership also lends itself to higher pay.

Combining business with a calling

Most people go into business, because that's what they want to do. Veterinarians, no matter what area of practice they prefer, are no different, Dicks said. He encourages veterinarians, like any other business-minded professionals, to plan ahead to maximize their opportunities.

"We know just like farmers and ranchers, we all weigh life in some ways with the amount of money we're making," Dicks said. "People must give up a little return to have the style of life they want. For veterinarians, that huge (college) debt can be a restraint. If I have debt when I get out of school, that means I may be driving a 10-year-old car, living with my roommate for another five years, and not going out or buying anything. I may be paying my debt and trying to make a life."

Fingland, who teaches veterinary business courses, said on the first day of orientation at K-State, he presents new students and their parents with numbers showing what the education will cost for the next four years of veterinary school to make them aware.

"There is no question that there is a financial problem at work, and I worry about it like other people in my position worry about it," Fingland said. "But, there is value in doing what is your calling. I understand as a veterinarian that I'm not going to make as much money as someone in another profession. I don't want to be in that other profession, so what difference does it make if that person makes more money than I do?"

"We can't tell young people who aspire to be veterinarians, 'You shouldn't do this, because you won't make as much money as you could doing something else,'" he continued. "Is that what we're going to tell people who want to teach? Imagine if somebody would have turned away the wonderful teachers that we had in grade school, high school and college. That would have been very unfortunate."

Fingland said preparing students to be business-minded veterinarians involves work in and out of the classroom. In addition to one required business and finance course, veterinary students at K-State are allowed to take elective business courses and join organizations such as the Veterinary Business Management Association. They also learn about planning and budgeting through K-State's Powercat Financial Counseling, available as a free resource for all students.

Involving the veterinarian

As a livestock producer, Dicks said he believes it is essential to have a veterinarian as part of your health team if you own animals. Sometimes the veterinarian might be considered a provider of last resort or someone whose job can be handled by salesmen or technicians for artificial insemination, embryo transfer, ultrasounding for carcass characteristics or pregnancy, hoof trimming and nutritional planning, as examples.

But, he said in the last 10 years the cattle industry has experienced diseases such as trichomoniasis and curly calf syndrome, among others, that may have surprised some producers. Having a close relationship with a veterinarian could help protect animals from diseases and producers from major financial losses.

"Maybe because a veterinarian wasn't part of our herd health program, we only found out about these diseases once they happened to us," Dicks said. "Some of those things cause 20 to 30 percent losses."

"What we focus on is teaching veterinary students to thrive in a competitive environment, not in an unrealistic environment where there's no competition," Fingland said. "There are many things veterinarians can do that others can't do who don't have the level of training. No one will ever replace the veterinarians' intellect, when they go to a farm to analyze the nutrition that the rancher or farmer is providing, and the environment and how that environment might lead to disease."

Source: Kansas State University Research and Extension

Small, fast, and crowded: Mammal traits amplify tick-borne illness

Chipmunks are small-bodied animals with fast lives and dense populations. When ticks feed on them, they are more likely to pick up multiple disease-causing pathogens. Credit: © dwags / Fotolia

In the U.S., some 300,000 people are diagnosed with Lyme disease annually. Thousands also suffer from babesiosis and anaplasmosis, tick-borne ailments that can occur alone or as co-infections with Lyme disease. According to a new paper published in PLOS ONE, when small, fast-living mammals abound, so too does our risk of getting sick.

In eastern and central North America, blacklegged ticks are the primary vectors for Lyme disease, babesiosis, and anaplasmosis. The pathogens that cause these illnesses are widespread in nature; ticks acquire them when they feed on infected animals.

Richard S. Ostfeld, the paper's lead author and a scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, has researched the ecology of Lyme disease since 1992. "A pattern emerged in our long-term studies. Ticks that fed on certain rodents and shrews were much more likely to pick up multiple pathogens, making the environment riskier for people."

To investigate why mammals differ in their 'reservoir competence' or ability to transmit pathogens to ticks, Ostfeld and his co-authors from Bard College, Oregon State University, the University of South Florida, and EcoHealth Alliance took a two-pronged approach.

First, they looked at life history traits for nine mammals known to harbor Lyme disease, babesiosis, and anaplasmosis. Attributes like body size, litter size, and life span were taken into consideration.

Then they looked at the role of mammal population density. As 'sit and wait' parasites, ticks are much more likely to encounter animals with dense populations. This, in turn, could help pathogens evolve to exploit specific hosts, resulting in more effective transmission rates.

For Lyme disease and anaplasmosis, fast life history features were a strong predictor of an animal's ability to transmit infection to ticks. Body size was inversely related to reservoir competence. Raccoon, skunk, opossum, squirrel, and deer infected fewer ticks than their mouse, chipmunk, and shrew counterparts.

Ostfeld notes, "This is consistent with past research on Lyme disease, West Nile virus, and Eastern Equine encephalitis. There is evidence that animals that mature early and have frequent, large litters invest less in some immune defenses, making them better pathogen hosts."

Population density was the best predictor of species' abilities to transmit all three pathogen groups, with animals that ticks encountered most frequently being the most effective at transferring infection. Co-author Felicia Keesing of Bard College explains, "Fast life history and high population density often go hand-in-hand. In rodents and shrews, pathogen adaptation and poor immune defense may be working together to amplify disease spread."

With Ostfeld concluding, "In our struggle to manage the ever-growing list of tick-borne diseases, we need to understand which animals magnify human disease risk. Our results suggest when generalist pathogens emerge, small mammals with large populations and a fast pace of life warrant careful monitoring."

Source: Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

Horses communicate with eyes and mobile ears

Author Jennifer Wathan is shown with study participant Bartie. Credit: Jennifer Wathan

Horses are sensitive to the facial expressions and attention of other horses, including the direction of the eyes and ears. The findings, reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on August 4, are a reminder for us humans to look beyond our own limitations and recognize that other species may communicate in ways that we can't, the researchers say. After all, human ears aren't mobile.

"Our study is the first to examine a potential cue to attention that humans do not have: the ears," says Jennifer Wathan of the University of Sussex. "Previous work investigating communication of attention in animals has focused on cues that humans use: body orientation, head orientation, and eye gaze; no one else had gone beyond that. However, we found that in horses their ear position was also a crucial visual signal that other horses respond to. In fact, horses need to see the detailed facial features of both eyes and ears before they use another horse's head direction to guide them."

The new study also challenges the earlier held notion that animals with eyes to the sides of their heads cannot glean information based on the direction of one another's gaze.

Wathan and the study's senior author Karen McComb took photographs to document cues given by horses when they were paying attention to something. Then Wathan and McComb used those photographs as life-sized models for other horses to look at as they chose between two feeding buckets. In each case, the horse in the photo was paying attention to one of the buckets and not the other. In some instances, the researchers also manipulated the image to remove information from key facial areas, including the eyes and the ears.

The researchers' observations show that horses rely on the head orientation of their peers to locate food. However, that ability to read each other's interest level is disrupted when parts of the face -- the eyes and ears -- are covered up with masks. The ability to correctly judge attention also varied depending on the identity of the horse pictured, suggesting that individual facial features may be important, the researchers report.

Wathan and McComb plan to continue to explore facial features related to the expression of emotion in their horses, noting that horses' rich social lives and close relationship to humans make them particularly interesting as study subjects. Our understanding of horses' social lives might also have implications for their welfare.

"Horses display some of the same complex and fluid social organization that we have as humans and that we also see in chimpanzees, elephants, and dolphins," Wathan says. "The challenges that living in these societies create, such as maintaining valuable social relationships on the basis of unpredictable interactions, are thought to have promoted the evolution of advanced social and communicative skills. There is a general interest in studying species with this social structure."

Source: Cell Press

Do women and men ride differently? Horses cannot tell the difference

Horses seem to be truly gender-neutral. It doesn't matter to them if their human partner is female or male.
Credit: Juliane Kuhl / Vetmeduni Vienna

Scientists at the Vetmeduni in Vienna have analysed how horses are affected by the sex of their riders. Various parameters of stress were determined in horses and their riders when they covered an obstacle course. The results were surprising: the level of stress on a horse is independent of whether a man or a woman is in the saddle. Furthermore, the stress responses of male and female riders are essentially the same. The results have been published in the Journal of Comparative Exercise Physiology.

For centuries, horse riding was largely restricted to males. The previous situation is in stark contrast to the present day, when nearly 80 percent of riders are women. Modern-day equestrian sports are unique in that men and women compete directly against one another at all levels, from beginners in gymkhanas to national champions in the Olympic Games. "For this reason it is interesting to consider whether a theory of riding that was developed exclusively for men can be applied to women," explains Natascha Ille, the first author of the recent publication.

A rider is a rider

As Ille notes, "It is often assumed that women are more sensitive towards their horses than men. If this is so, male and female riders should elicit different types of response from their horses." Ille, Christine Aurich and colleagues from the Vetmeduni Vienna´s Graf Lehndorff Institute tested this notion by examining eight horses and sixteen riders, including eight men and eight women. Each horse had to jump a standard course of obstacles twice, ridden once by a male and once by a female of similar equestrian experience. The scientists monitored the levels of stress in the horses and their riders, checking the amounts of cortisol in the saliva and the heart rates.

The results were unexpected. The level of cortisol in horses' saliva increased during the test but the increase was not affected by the sex of the rider. The horses' heart rates also increased as a result of taking the course but the increase was irrespective of the human partner in the saddle. The tests on the riders gave similar conclusions. Again, the level of cortisol in the saliva increased but there was no difference between men and women. The riders' pulses sped up when the horses switched from a walk to a canter and accelerated further during the jumping course. But the heart rate curves for male and female riders were close to identical.

The distribution of saddle pressure is the same for male and female riders
In a second experiment, Ille and her colleagues studied the pressure exerted on a horse's back via the saddle. As she explains, "Depending on the rider's posture and position, the pattern of pressure on the horse's back may change dramatically." A special pad placed directly under the saddle was used to analyse saddle pressure in walk, trot and canter. Because female riders are generally lighter than males, the saddle pressure was lower when horses were ridden by females. However, the distribution of pressure did not differ and there was no evidence of differences in the riding posture between males and females.

A fair chance for all

So what does all this mean for modern equestrian sports? Aurich is keen to reassure potential competitors that horses are truly gender-neutral. As she puts it, "Assuming that there is no difference in riding ability, from the horse's point of view, it does not seem to matter whether the human partner is male or female. Our results make it extremely unlikely that horses have a preference for riders of one sex over the other. And when male and female riders compete against one another in equestrian sports, all of them have similar chances of doing well."

Source: Veterinärmedizinische Universität Wien

Dogs hear our words and how we say them

The results from this study support the idea that our canine companions are paying attention "not only to who we are and how we say things, but also to what we say," authors say. Credit: © Uros Petrovic / Fotolia

 When people hear another person talking to them, they respond not only to what is being said--those consonants and vowels strung together into words and sentences--but also to other features of that speech--the emotional tone and the speaker's gender, for instance. Now, a report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on November 26 provides some of the first evidence of how dogs also differentiate and process those various components of human speech.

"Although we cannot say how much or in what way dogs understand information in speech from our study, we can say that dogs react to both verbal and speaker-related information and that these components appear to be processed in different areas of the dog's brain," says Victoria Ratcliffe of the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex.

Previous studies showed that dogs have hemispheric biases--left brain versus right--when they process the vocalization sounds of other dogs. Ratcliffe and her supervisor David Reby say it was a logical next step to investigate whether dogs show similar biases in response to the information transmitted in human speech. They played speech from either side of the dog so that the sounds entered each of their ears at the same time and with the same amplitude.

"The input from each ear is mainly transmitted to the opposite hemisphere of the brain," Ratcliffe explains. "If one hemisphere is more specialized in processing certain information in the sound, then that information is perceived as coming from the opposite ear."
If the dog turned to its left, that showed that the information in the sound being played was heard more prominently by the left ear, suggesting that the right hemisphere is more specialized in processing that kind of information.

The researchers did observe general biases in dogs' responses to particular aspects of human speech. When presented with familiar spoken commands in which the meaningful components of words were made more obvious, dogs showed a left-hemisphere processing bias, as indicated by turning to the right. When the intonation or speaker-related vocal cues were exaggerated instead, dogs showed a significant right-hemisphere bias.

"This is particularly interesting because our results suggest that the processing of speech components in the dog's brain is divided between the two hemispheres in a way that is actually very similar to the way it is separated in the human brain," Reby says.
Of course, it doesn't mean that dogs actually understand everything that we humans might say or that they have a human-like ability of language--far from it. But, says Ratcliffe, these results support the idea that our canine companions are paying attention "not only to who we are and how we say things, but also to what we say."

All of this should come as good news to many of us dog-loving humans, as we spend considerable time talking to our respective pups already. They might not always understand you, but they really are listening.

Source: Cell Press

New natural supplement relieves canine arthritis

Portrait old dog

Arthritis pain in dogs can be relieved, with no side effects, by a new product based on medicinal plants and dietary supplements that was developed at the University of Montreal's Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. "While acupuncture and electrical stimulation are two approaches that have been shown to have positive effects on dogs, until now a few studies have investigated a plant-based approach to therapy," explained Professor Éric Troncy, senior author of the study. His findings were published in Research in Veterinary Science.

Troncy and his team worked with 32 dogs (and their owners!) who had been diagnosed with arthritis by X-ray and orthopaedic exam, and who all weighed more than 20 kilograms. By drawing on existing rodent studies and working with Pierre Haddad of the university's Department of Pharmacology, Troncy developed two formulas for his trial. These formulas are not currently commercially available.

The first formula, composed of curcumin, devil's claw, black current, Indian frankincense (Salai), willow bark, pineapple bromelaine and camomile, was developed to treat arthritis-induced inflammation. The second included the same ingredients, plus dietary supplements such as omega 3, chondroitin sulfate and glutamine, and was formulated in the hope that it would promote the regeneration of articulations.

Half the dogs received the first formula for four weeks and then the second formula for another four weeks. The other half, acting as the control, received a placebo. The outcomes were tested using three methods. Firstly, the dogs were filmed as they walked at a consistent speed over a special platform that captures the strength of each paw. Secondly, a special electronic collar recorded the dogs' daily activities. And finally, the owners were asked to provide their own evaluations of their dog's behaviour.

The researchers were able to identify an improvement by the fourth week of the trial. "After the eight week course, on average, the strength of the dogs receiving treatment had improved to the equivalent of a kilo of extra strength per paw, which is moreover. None of these dogs saw their health decline, unlike 35.8% of the dogs who were given the placebo," said Maxim Moreau, who was first author of the study.

The improvements were also reflected in the dogs' daily lives. The collars revealed that the dogs receiving treatment maintained their physical activity, and in fact the group average increased from six hours of daily activity to eight. Meanwhile, the dogs receiving the placebo were progressively less active. "In some cases, we recorded the dogs to ensure that the collar was recording actual physical activity rather than movements such as scratching," Troncy explained.

Nonetheless, the ratings from the owners were more mixed. "This third evaluation was more subjective and the contrast between the test group and the control group less stark," Troncy said. "We suspect that the owner may have forgotten what the animal's behaviour was like before it developed arthritis."

The findings raise the possibility of offering a new form of treatment to human beings. "The model of evaluation that we have used is the best for predicting the efficacy of anti-arthritis treatments. We can therefore consider that clinical trials on humans would have a good chance of having positive outcomes," Troncy said.

About this study: This study was funded in part by a grant from ArthroLab Inc., an ongoing New Opportunities Fund grant (#9483) and a Leader Opportunity Fund grant (#24601) from the Canada Foundation for Innovation for the pain/function equipment, a Discovery Grant (#327158-2008; #441651-2013) from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for the bio-analyses and salaries, and by the Osteoarthritis Chair of the University of Montreal Hospital Centre, Université de Montréal. Maxim Moreau received a doctoral scholarship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (TGF-53914) -- Strategic Training Initiative in Health Research program (MENTOR) and a doctoral scholarship from the Fonds de recherche du Québec-Santé.

Source: Universite de Montreal

Natural substance in red wine has an anti-inflammatory effect in cardiovascular diseases

Researchers see great therapeutic potential in the natural substance resveratrol, particularly in connection with prevention of the synthesis of inflammatory factors in cardiovascular diseases. Credit: photo/©: Peter Pulkowski, Mainz University Medical Center

A natural substance present in red wine, resveratrol, inhibits the formation of inflammatory factors that trigger cardiovascular diseases. This has been established by a research team at the Department of Pharmacology of the University Medical Center of Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (JGU) working in collaboration with researchers of the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena and the University of Vienna. Their results have recently been published in the scientific journal Nucleic Acids Research.

Despite the fact that they eat more fatty foods, the French tend to less frequently develop cardiac diseases than Germans. This so-called French Paradox is attributed to the higher consumption of red wine in France and it has already been the subject of various studies in the past. A number of research projects have actually demonstrated that the natural product resveratrol, present in red wine, has a protective effect against cardiovascular diseases. But what exactly is the reason for this? It seems that at least part of the protective effect can be explained by the fact that resveratrol inhibits the formation of inflammatory factors, a conclusion reached by the research team of Junior Professor Andrea Pautz and Professor Hartmut Kleinert of the Mainz University Medical Center following collaboration in a joint project with Professor Oliver Werz of the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena and Professor Verena Dirsch of the University of Vienna. In fact, the researchers discovered that the natural substance binds to the regulator protein KSRP and activates it. KSRP reduces the stability of messenger RNA (mRNA) in connection with a number of inflammatory mediators and thus inhibits their synthesis.

"We now know more precisely how resveratrol inhibits the formation of the inflammatory factors that trigger cardiovascular diseases. This is an important finding in view of the fact that more recent research has shown that cardiovascular diseases are significantly promoted by inflammatory processes in the body," said Pautz. Cardiovascular disorders, such as myocardial infarction and strokes, frequently occur in association with chronic inflammatory diseases, such as arthritis. The natural substance resveratrol thus has major therapeutic potential, particularly when it comes to the treatment of inflammatory diseases that can cause serious damage to the cardiovascular system.

Source: Universität Mainz