CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR WILDLIFE DISEASE SURVEILLANCE IN SRI LANKA.

The Sri Lanka Wildlife Health Centre was created in 2011 as an intersectoral surveillance system intended to address gaps in emerging and zoonotic disease preparedness in the country. This study, which was conducted during August 2015 to November 2015, examined perceived obstacles and opportunities to undertake wildlife disease surveillance in Sri Lanka. Responses to a pretested postal questionnaire by 315 field officers from the Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWC) and Department of Animal Production and Health (livestock development instructors [LDIs] and field veterinary surgeons [FVSs]) were used in the analysis. Responses came from all 25 administrative districts in the country. The reported obstacles (and proportion of respondents) included lack of transport facilities (80%), skilled staff (75%), infrastructure (65%), human resources (62%), training (67%), and a mandate for getting involved in wildlife disease surveillance (28%). These obstacles have resulted in rare or sporadic collection and submission of samples and their testing for surveillance purposes. A focus on rabies surveillance found that 84 (78%) DWC officers whose mandate was to deal with wild animals and 41 (40%) LDIs whose mandate was to deal with agricultural animals had inadequate knowledge to inform rabies surveillance activities and actions. Despite being outside of their mandate, 68% of FVSs and 72% of LDI s were willing to contribute to wild animal disease surveillance. Overcoming legal impediments to handling wildlife was cited as an essential step to establishing a multisectoral surveillance system involving government branches, universities, and citizens.

Surveillance Opportunities and the Need for Intersectoral Collaboration on Rabies in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka is progressing towards its goal of eliminating human rabies. This goal rests on programs designed to limit canine rabies, which in turn requires a combination of targeted dog rabies control and a better understanding of the movement of the virus between domestic animals, people, and wildlife. Coordinated and integrated surveillance of the disease between human and animal health sectors underpins successful rabies elimination. Our objective was to review surveillance data from 2005 to 2014 to assemble the first multispecies synthesis of rabies information in Sri Lanka and, in doing so, assess needs and opportunities for a One Health approach to rabies surveillance in the country. Our descriptive epidemiological findings were consistent with other studies showing a decline in human cases, endemic and unchanging numbers of dog cases, a relationship between human density and the occurrence of human and animal cases, and significant gaps in understanding trends in rabies incidences in livestock and wildlife. Assessing the trends in the data from the three government organizations responsible for rabies surveillance was difficult due to lack of information on animal population sizes, unquantified sampling biases due to inequities in access to diagnostic capacities, regulatory and administrative barriers, and a continued reliance on clinical means to establish a diagnosis. The information required for a comprehensive rabies control programme was not standardized or consistent, was not in one place, showed significant gaps in completeness, and was not amenable to routine and rapid analysis. Achieving rabies elimination in Sri Lanka would benefit from harmonization of diagnostic and information management standards across animal and human health sectors as well as equitable access to diagnostic capacity for all regions and species.

Reconstructing the evolutionary history of pandemic foot-and-mouth disease viruses: the impact of recombination within the emerging O/ME-SA/Ind-2001 lineage.

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a highly contagious disease of livestock affecting animal production and trade throughout Asia and Africa. Understanding FMD virus (FMDV) global movements and evolution can help to reconstruct the disease spread between endemic regions and predict the risks of incursion into FMD-free countries. Global expansion of a single FMDV lineage is rare but can result in severe economic consequences. Using extensive sequence data we have reconstructed the global space-time transmission history of the O/ME-SA/Ind-2001 lineage (which normally circulates in the Indian sub-continent) providing evidence of at least 15 independent escapes during 2013-2017 that have led to outbreaks in North Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the Far East and the FMD-free islands of Mauritius. We demonstrated that sequence heterogeneity of this emerging FMDV lineage is accommodated within two co-evolving divergent sublineages and that recombination by exchange of capsid-coding sequences can impact upon the reconstructed evolutionary histories. Thus, we recommend that only sequences encoding the outer capsid proteins should be used for broad-scale phylogeographical reconstruction. These data emphasise the importance of the Indian subcontinent as a source of FMDV that can spread across large distances and illustrates the impact of FMDV genome recombination on FMDV molecular epidemiology.