Working from Home and COVID-19: The Chances and Risks for Gender Gaps.

As the COVID-19 pandemic causes a record number of people to work from home, this disruptive event will likely have a long-lasting impact on work arrangements. Given existing research on the effects of working from home on hours worked and wages, an increased availability of working from home may provide a chance for women to catch up with their male counterparts. Yet, the need to simultaneously care for children during the COVID-19 lockdown may also revive traditional gender roles, potentially counteracting such gains. We discuss the likely effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender gaps in the labour market and at home in light of recent empirical findings and novel statistics on the heterogeneous structure of work arrangements among couples. We construct a novel teleworkability index that differentiates between fully teleworkable, partly teleworkable and on-site jobs and find that in about a third of households the COVID-19 shock is likely to induce shifts in the intra-household allocation of tasks from mothers to fathers.

Dilution effect in bovine tuberculosis: risk factors for regional disease occurrence in Africa.

Changes in host diversity have been postulated to influence the risk of infectious diseases, including both dilution and amplification effects. The dilution effect refers to a negative relationship between biodiversity and disease risk, whereas the amplification effect occurs when biodiversity increases disease risk. We tested these effects with an influential disease, bovine tuberculosis (BTB), which is widespread in many countries, causing severe economic losses. Based on the BTB outbreak data in cattle from 2005 to 2010, we also tested, using generalized linear mixed models, which other factors were associated with the regional BTB presence in cattle in Africa. The interdependencies of predictors and their correlations with BTB presence were examined using path analysis. Our results suggested a dilution effect, where increased mammal species richness was associated with reduced probability of BTB presence after adjustment for cattle density. In addition, our results also suggested that areas with BTB infection in the preceding year, higher cattle density and larger percentage of area occupied by African buffalo were more likely to report BTB outbreaks. Climatic variables only indirectly influenced the risk of BTB presence through their effects on cattle density and wildlife distribution. Since most studies investigating the role of wildlife species on BTB transmission only involve single-species analysis, more efforts are needed to better understand the effect of the structure of wildlife communities on BTB dynamics.

Ten years' work on the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) Worldwide Animal Disease Notification System.

This article gives an overview of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) Worldwide Animal Disease Notification System and highlights the major achievements during the past decade. It describes the different types of disease notification reports received and processed by the OIE. It also evaluates the three strategies implemented by the OIE in the recent years aimed at improving disease notification: introduction and use of a secure online notification system World Animal Health Information System (WAHIS) and its database interface World Animal Health Information Database (WAHID); implementation of active search and verification procedures for non-official information; and enhanced building of capacity for animal disease notification to the OIE by Members Countries. The improvements are evidenced by the increasing number of reports submitted on an annual basis and the reduction in submission time together with an improvement in the quality and quantity of the immediate notifications and follow-up reports, six-monthly and annual reports submitted by Veterinary Authorities. In the recent years, the OIE's notification system provides an early warning system more sensitive and global. Consequently, there is a greater knowledge of animal diseases' distribution worldwide. As a result, it is possible to ensure better prevention, more accurate risk assessment and evaluation by diminishing the spread of known or newly emerging pathogens.