Our collaborative paper, published in PLoS Global Health, entitled “Current approaches in livestock geotagging: Assessing available technologies and applications to public health research in Kenya and Malawi”, was led by Dr Julianne Meisner, University of Washington (UW), US. Julianne is a research veterinarian within the UW’s Departments of Epidemiology and Global Health. She was originally trained in Edinburgh, UK and shares our interest in zoonotic disease surveillance at the human-livestock interface.
Honed by several years of experience, the report describes our collective research on the development, application, and benefits of GPS-tracking technologies as applied to large animals, cattle, camels, sheep, goats, and donkeys, in rural Eastern and Southern Africa. Our aim was to better understand the transmission of key zoonotic diseases, caused by coronaviruses or schistosomes, by carefully recording the spatial epidemiology of pathogens and parasites within key animals and analysing how they spread across the landscape through animals’ movements and proximity to people.
In Malawi, our GPS-tracking studies gave us an insight into how often herded cattle entered Lake Malawi. We estimated their individual duration of exposure to be approximately 45 minutes per day. While the animals are watering or grazing on emergent vegetation, schistosomes have ample opportunity to infect them, as discussed in our One Health article and previous HUGS website blog. It also helped to explain why the deworming treatment of these animals with praziquantel was quickly eroded by high rates of reinfection.
Since GPS technology is continuously advancing, it can be bewildering for researchers first entering this field and selecting the most appropriate method for their application. We hope our article better guides colleagues’ One Health research by discussing this technology’s achievements alongside its limitations. In so doing, we highlighted several upgrades in commercially available geo-tracking units, their dynamic costs in satellite or mobile phone network subscriptions, and contextualised them all against the growing interest, acceptance and application within modern precision farming methods, which is continuing to spur the most significant innovation across the world.