Team member Machunde Bigambo takes blood from a goat outside a "boma."

I spent this last week with one of the founding members of the Carnivore Disease Project, Dr. Sarah Cleaveland from the University of Glasgow. It was Sarah who, in mid-90s, began the rabies-surveillance and dog-vaccination programs around Serengeti National Park that Lincoln Park Zoo is now working so hard to fund.

Sarah and I travelled to the Loliondo Division, which is on the eastern fringes of the Serengeti National Park, to begin the process of setting up a disease-surveillance system. The project is being run in conjunction with the Sokoine University of Agriculture and involves the establishment of livestock sentinel herds in villages adjacent to Serengeti National Park.

Follow up:

Dr. Ennos and Dr. Cleaveland hand out veterinary drugs to a Maasai livestock owner.

However, there has been a prolonged drought in the Loliondo Division, and consequently cattle mortality in the area has been devastatingly high. It was terrible to see carcasses piled up under almost every tree, the landscape strewn with skeletons and calves dying in front of you. In many villages, herd owners have lost more than 50 percent of adult cattle. For this reason, we were uncertain whether it would be possible to even start sampling at this difficult time.

Dead catttle - they had died from starvation and pneumonia due to the long drought. The grass is green as the rains have just started.

Remarkably, the Maasai still welcomed us into the “bomas” where they keep their animals and were very keen for us to carry out blood sampling. (Being dedicated livestock keepers, they understand the importance of infectious disease control.) They were particularly pleased that we were able to carry out some clinical and post-mortem investigations on some of their sick and recently dead cattle. Although starvation has certainly been widespread, our investigations found that many animals were also suffering from pneumonia.

A post-mortem of a dead cow. These exams provide a better understanding of livestock health.

Incredibly, despite the very difficult conditions, we managed to visit all eight selected villages and collected blood from approximately 700 cattle and 700 sheep and goats by the end of the weeklong sampling trip. However, this is only the beginning, as the team must return to these very same villages to collect samples from the same individual cattle three more times during the year and—funding permitting—in years to come.

Maasai goats outside their traditional boma.

Such “longitudinal” sampling will enable us to determine how the infectious status (for a number of selected diseases) of each individual animal changes in time. This information will be invaluable for determining the significance that potential risk factors like rainfall, herd size and proximity to the Serengeti National Park boundary have on the incidence of disease. And, as is typical with this “one-health” approach to disease monitoring, this information will be very useful not only for the livestock sector, but also for the management of threatened wildlife species and for public health purposes.

Maasai women tend their goats

Felix Lankester