h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, okay. Sounds ponderous, doesn't it?

I've been doing some research on banana plantations and the over-use of pesticides, and came across a concept I hadn't encountered before.

Chiquita Banana (and other banana producers) mainly grow the yellow Gran Cavendish banana. This has allowed the Black Sigatoka fungus to evolve, training the fungus to attack the Gran Cavendish banana more efficiently. Which means Chiquita Banana has to double the spraying of pesticides to keep the banana plants from dying, which increases the resistance of the fungus, and so forth. The plantations are huge, and are almost all the same kind of plant.

I realized that this is the problem that we're having with foot and mouth and BSE. Because we've been raising the same kind of cows and sheep for hundreds of years, diseases have evolved to take advantage of a particular breed's genetic weaknesses. They've been feeding ground-up cow to cows for years, but only recently has BSE become a serious problem. Foot and mouth has been around for a long time, but never before have we raised herds of this size. Now we're dealing with the consequences of hundreds of years of tradition and agriculture.

I'd love to write an entry on this, but I'm not even sure if I'm on the right track or not. I don't have enough information, and I'm not a biologist. I'm hoping that some bulging brains will come along and help me out - add more information, say "no, you've got it all wrong," or something.

What do you guys think? Please let me know!

- Lentilla

Hi Lentilla

Wow, interesting subject but where to start. Maybe look at some of the existing medical entries and see who wrote them, you might find a doctor or biologist that would be able to help you out?

One went through the Scouts forum, just the other day, Mesothelioma, I think that was written by a Biologist. Maybe try him or her?

Good luck!

I think you have to remember that Foot and Mouth affects many different species and sub-species of animals. In itslf it exists in several different forms. Do a search on the net andyou will find some interesting EU papers about the forms and on monitoring.

With BSE, the problem was that the disease had mutated several times, we simply introduced a new way of passing it around the animal (and subsequently human) population.

By the way, I am not sure you can apply "monoculture" to animals - I think it is a term that only applies to crops.

I'm sure you're right - but I'm not sure what to call it! As I've read more about FMD and BSE on the net, I'm refining my thesis. What we're suffering right now are the growing pains as farmers learn more efficient, yet safe ways to raise large groups of cattle and large crops. Problems like FMD will continue to beset us until we can find safer ways of raising animals.

So far:
• We need to diversify the agricultural industry so we won't be so dependent on a few species of animal/plants.
• Develop better hi-pro feed for animals to avoid contagion between different species - everything I've read indicated that both BSE and FMD were transmitted at least in part by consumption of infected meat.
• Research new ways of raising animals to prevent (or at least discourage) disease

"While rendered animal-part supplements provided additional protein that encouraged more rapid growth of cows, they also opened a completely new series of doors through which the infectious agent of T.S.E could first cross from sheep into cattle, then sweep through cattle herds with extraordinary speed and efficiency, and finally jump another species barrier into humans." Joe Lavine - [url removed by moderator]

Lots of other people have already had the same idea I had... But I'll continue to look around and see what I can come up with. Thanks for your help!

Foot and mouth itself is NOT due modern farming practices. It is an old disease of many varieties which can infect many species to a greater or lesser extent.

The current spread of foot and mouth IS a result of modern farming practices and economics. Moving millions of live animals within and across national boundaries makes it pretty close to inevitable that disease will spread. Just as the growth of human travel means the spread of human disease (yesterday, Tierra del Fuegans wiped out by colds and measles: today, ebola in Europe).

Uniformity, or monoculture is also a result, or even a recommended practice, of modern farming practices. It can certainly lead to the adaptation of more troublesome pests (virus, bacteria, fungus, weed, insect, mammal, it could be anything). And so you apply more pesticide or you go for genetic modification...

Here is something that I would like answered:

It seems to be well agreed that the modern practice of moving animals around the country has increased the spread of FMD - however, these practices were not present in the 60's during the last out break.

So what IS the commonality between the two incidences. I dont think the way that FMD got into the herds in the first place is much of an issue. What ever you do, illegal practices will always create problems - there is a limit to how well you can ever enforce the legislation.

I don't know enough about the 1967 outbreak to comment.

What I can say is that the level of illegal traffic in animals and meat will be proportional to the scale of the "legitimate" trade.

I haven't read enough on the subject yet to be opening my mouth, but I'm going to go out on a limb here. I think that pigs were probably the animals that spread the disease to other bovidae & camelidae. Small farmers still give their pigs slops, which must be heated to 100° C before serving to kill all bacteria. Presumably meat tainted with the Type O virus somehow ended up at that farm in England... where the pigs ate it and passed it around.

"infected meat fed to pigs in Northumberland in swill is regarded as the most likely cause of the outbreak..."

"There is a worldwide epidemic of a virulent virus of foot and mouth called Type O which reached 60 countries in 1999. South America, South Africa and Asia have all had outbreaks. The immense increase in free trade - making import restrictions more difficult - means infected meat is traded round the world. That makes more countries vulnerable to
outbreaks. Once present it spreads very quickly and can travel more than 100 miles as an airborne infection." - Paul Brown, The Guardian

The outbreak in 1967 was much worse - 400,000 animals slaughtered. I think that incident encouraged MAFF and others to move quickly and stop the epidemic before it started. We've only had 25,000 animals slaughtered so far, which ain't too bad. What a lot of people have been complaining about is that FMD is not a fatal disease, but it does reduce meat and milk production. What I'm wondering is that if the animals aren't vaccinated against foot and mouth, then the next time it pops up, a lot more animals will have to be slaughtered. I think we're setting ourselves up for a fall - we can't keep killing animals every time they get sick. Rather like throwing away the houseplants because they need water. We'd be better off with a huge vaccination program and revised methods of raising animals. (Cows, sheep, goats, pigs, deer, buffalo, camels, etc. - anything with a hoof.) Eventually, all strains of foot-and-mouth virus will have died off.

I'm still working on a coherent thesis that ties all those ideas together - any and all comments are appreciated.

No time this morning to answer your various points, but I think the toll is well into seven figures.

Lentilla. So glad you're doing this. It looks very very interesting. I'd like to stay and get stuck in to the subject but I have a bit of a prob with my back and can't sit for more than a couple of mins.

Just thought I'd better point out to you that about 2.5 million animals have been slaughtered so far because of this f&m outbreak. Where did you get the figure of 25,000? You're missing some very significant zeros. I've been keeping a foot and mouth diary over at ezboard's goooverflow if you're interested. Haven't updated it for a few days because of said back prob.

Also (apologies of any seeming self promotion) I've done a prion entry that you might like to have a look at. Also (further apologies) there's a thread hanging off the unedited version that's got a fair amount of additional info and speculation on it.

I'll pop over and get another couple of penn'th in when I can sit a bit longer.

Sal

PS Loved your banana entry!

Ooops... well, I'm getting all this info from the net (mostly the Guardian and Nova, although I stopped by MAFF to check out their stats on fat to meat ratio. Hmm.. 2.5 Mil, you say. Ouch! Okay - time for more research! And yeah, I'd like to check out your FMD diary for more info.

Glad you liked the banana entry - sorry your back is bad... get better soon!

You can find a link to my foot and mouth diary on this page:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A530263

Sal

Had a couple of ideas about some things that might interest you. If you are interested and don't already know about them, tell me and I'll chug them out for you.

One was about genetically modified oil seed rape they're having a problem with in Canada.

The other was about some studies that have shown that animals (including humans) tend to pick mates that are most different from them genetically. This is thought to give their off-spring better protection against certain disease. If you don't know about it, I'll tell you about the BO T-shirt experiment.

If you're looking for someone who knows a lot about biology, Orcus is probably your man. Wumbeevil also knows plenty but he's in the middle of moving house so hasn't been around much lately.

Sal

I checked out your diary - lots of good information in there, and I can see that both you and Orcus seem to know a lot about the subject already. I noticed that early on Orcus commented on the very same thesis that I'm trying to cobble together; he seemed to be dubious about the whole thing, but I'll bounce the idea off him and see what he thinks.

Tell me about the BOT-shirt thingie - doesn't surprise me, my hubby and I are VERY different. I read about the rape seed oil problem in the FMD diary - sounds like they were more successful than they planned!

I finally have something that resembles a thesis. It's a little more coherent than when I started out. Shooters of holes welcome!

Problem: A few farmers are producing large amounts of food for world-wide populations. This forces them to breed for size/high yield. Considering how many different kinds of edible grains, vegetables, fruits and animals there are, it seems ridiculous that only a small fraction of those are popularly cultivated. I suspect that the plants that we grow now are the ones that are easiest to cultivate. So for hundreds of years, we've been raising the same kinds of animals/plants. Domestic cattle, swine, and cultivated crops have become susceptible to various diseases that natural selection would have bred out. We've helped that along by spreading pesticides and fungicides, and (in some cases) killing the cattle that have become infected. Moreover, we're raising larger groups of animals and larger crops than we have in decades past, and so disease has a greater chance of spreading. Then we ship the crops/animals all over the world and spread disease to their overbred cattle and crops.

Solution: Introduce greater variety into our crops and domestic animals.

Here's where I'll have to consult the bulging brains for ideas: I've got some, but they're unresearched.

Practice variegated farming (I don't know what the technical term is) so that the farmer raises a variety of animals that can't pass diseases to each another. Emu is a hi-protein red meat that is lower in fat than beef, and birds cannot catch foot and mouth disease. Turkey is low-fat and hi-protein. Changing the focus from beef to other meat producing animals will also change our economy - the growing of corn can be diverted to making alcohol, which we'll need in the next twenty years for putting in our cars. We should also be considereding genetic manipulation of our existing cattle and swine to eliminate susceptibility to current diseases like F&M and BSE.

Sorry if I'm repeating myself from previously - sometimes I have to write it down to clarify it for myself.

Hi Lentilla, I'm actually a bit busy at work at the moment so I've only got time for one or two quick comments.

First off, there are a large variety of FMD viruses and as with the flu you can only vaccinate agains one. The FMD virus also mutates quite rapidly. I'm afraid vaccination is only a short term solution, its like trying to vaccinate against the common cold, it unfortunately won't really work with our current vaccines.

Er, Emu's might not get FMDV but you can bet your bottom dollar they are susceptible to something, we live in a world that has disease, we have to accept this and deal with it. Countries that have endemic FMDV don't appear to be starving because of it as far as I can see. I personally find it appalling that mass slaughtering is going on for a disease that doesn't kill and the animals will make a full recovery from (with some scarring). Someone mentioned humans getting it above, there was one confirmed case in 1967 and so far none this time. Even if you do get it, its about as serious as dandruff.

You are right about us only breeding a few crops because of economic pressures... A larger variety would be better. However, you can understand farmers wanting to kill insects, it may be difficult to imagine in the UK but in other countries they have locusts - these will descend and destroy an entire crop in a very short space of time - not good for your business.

I'm not convinced we have bred overly susceptible-to-disease animals. I would imagine that being kept in close quarters, often with poor hygeine, they are probably more resistant than they may have been in the past. Besides, diseases (viruses and proteins) evolve more quickly than large mammals by several orders of magnitude. A virulent disease selects itself out of the life pool as it will kill its hosts too quickly for it to spread and multiply effectively - the really successful bacteria are those innocuous ones that don't cause suffering to their hosts. So really I suspect the disease will get less severe before the cows get resisitant to it - at least that's the way I see it.

Certainly growing only a few crops is leaving ourselves open to a disaster if ever one really was affected by a plague-like microbe or insect. Variety would be much better for this reason. This argument is one of the most powerful in the scientific community for avoiding too much reliance on GM crops - the other main one is to stop the Agrochemical companies patenting crops and then screwing over all the farmers who have to buy the seed every year off them - talk about a powerful monopoly position -they could effectively hold the world to ransom for their food supplies -not good. I'm afraid these are the real reasons why GM crops may not be a good idea, the stuff you read about in the popular press is generally a lot of old tosh I'm afraid.

Anyway, that wasn't such a short message after all was it

Oh, and genetic manipulation of animals to reduce susceptibilty to FMDV and other viruses is being looked into already (has been for many years in fact)

I'll keep an eye out here, this should be good stuff...

Ok. I read a thing about how people in different blood groups were susceptible to different diseases. It seems, for example, that people with type O blood are very susceptible to cholera. People with type B are quite susceptible, those with type A are fairly resistant and those with type AB are very resistant indeed. Genetically, A and B are co-dominant whereas O is recessive. In areas where Cholera is endemic, it would make sense for people of group A to mate with people of group B in the hope of having many highly resistant AB children. There's a lot more to that part of the story involving the fact that As, Bs and ABs are susceptible to other diseases - Os are more resistant to syphilis and malaria, for example. Anyway, that's the sawn-down, version.

It also explained about the gene mutation that causes sickle-cell disease that's very common in some areas of Africa where malaria is endemic. People with one copy of the gene very rarely get malaria and don't suffer too badly with sickle-cell anaemia whereas people without the mutation fall easy prey to malaria and people with 2 copies of the sickle-cell mutation may die of sickle-cell anaemia. So if you live in that sort of area it's best for people with one copy of the gene to mate with someone who doesn't have the mutation and vice versa.

The gene responsible for cystic fibrosis protects against typhoid. If you carry just one copy of the gene, you get the protection without getting cystic fibrosis.

There's a genetic condition that makes people more susceptible to meningitis while protecting them against respiratory infections like flu.

So if you live in certain areas of the world, it can be very handy to have just one copy of the potentially dangerous version of a gene, but not two. How on earth do you know who is likely to be a good partner, genetically speaking?

It seems that it's been known for some time that lady mice will, given a choice, always choose a gentleman mouse that is most genetically different from her to mate with. She can tell by sniffing his wee. Up until recently it had been assumed that Ms Mouse was following her instincts for outbreeding - avoiding the problems of inbreeding. Now they think there may be more to it.

A couple of scientists asked half a dozen people - male and female to wear cotton T-shirts for a couple of days without washing or wearing any deodorants or perfumes. Then they made a careful note of the wearer and their genetic make-up and asked somewhere between 100 and 200 people to sniff the T-shirts and state their preferences. What they found was that most people preferred the smell of people of the opposite sex who were genetically most different from themselves.

So there you have it. We can tell who's different from us on a level we're not even aware of. Genetic variety is a very good thing and lack of variety is likely to make animals - and probably plants too - more vulnerable to diseases.

Sal

PS Just listened to something on a new tv channel about a Japanese team who've finished mapping the genome of Staphylococcus aurius (sp?) Orcus. It has about 2,600 genes. They reckon they'll have drugs to treat those nasty infections people pick up in hospitals within about 5 years. S'pose you already knew that

No I didn't actually but I knew Bacillus had been sequenced a few years ago. (S. aureus BTW) Just cos they sequenced it doesn't mean they can do anything else to kill it. That is a very dubious claim in my opinion. 2,600 is a very small number of genes, even Bacillus has around 4000 and that's just another bacterium.

For someone who is not in the business, Sal, you certainly knew your stuff.

Actually, I've been thinking about what I said earlier, and you have pretty much come up with the counter argument I was going to put down. Yes, genetic inbreeding is not good for species survival but I'm not sure cattle and other farm animals are all that inbred. After all, prize bull's do get put up for auction to the highest bidder so he can do his stuff at stud. Animals such as cattle have a doiminant bull who tends to mate with a large number of females and prevent the other males from doing so - this narrows down the genetic diversity yet it does ensure 'big strong aggressive bull genes' get passed on.

Congratulations Lentilla! Your "Bananas" is the Editor's Selection on the front page today. How lovely to be the chosen one

Kind of you to think I know my stuff Orcus. I only know about stuff that's caught my imagination so I've been driven to find out as more about it. So my knowledge about things like this is patchy and fairly shallow. If some scientist pops up on the tv and says that because they've mapped the genome of S aureus they'll have no problem developing perfect drugs to cope with its infections within 5 years, you're immediately suspicious whereas I have to have it pointed out to me that the claim is unrealistic. Now I'll be suspicious when I hear claims like that in future. I'll remember what you said

Sal

Sal, I'll have to introduce you to the PhD students in my research group, believe me I would have been stunned if any of them had come up with any of that. They may have done a degree and be studying for a PhD but I find it depressing sometimes that they don't actually seem to be interested in what they're doing. You can forgive undergraduates for that but when they start a PhD they are training to be professional scientists!

BTW Sal, there is a seminar by an external speaker in my department this afternoon entitled "Killing Resistant Bacteria", I may update my article on this if its interesting enough. Seeing as noone seems to be bothering with it on Peer Review now, I doubt that will cause any problems...
Should be an interesting talk at least.