Imperial College London
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Professor Christl Donnelly CBE FMedSci FRS

Faculty of Medicine, School of Public Health

Visiting Professor
 
 
 
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Contact

 

c.donnelly Website

 
 
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Location

 

School of Public HealthWhite City Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Woodroffe:2021:10.1111/jzo.12863,
author = {Woodroffe, R and Donnelly, C and Chapman, K and Ham, C and Moyes, K and Stratton, N and Cartwright, S},
doi = {10.1111/jzo.12863},
journal = {Journal of Zoology},
pages = {132--142},
title = {Successive use of shared space by badgers and cattle: implications for Mycobacterium bovis transmission},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jzo.12863},
volume = {314},
year = {2021}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Managing infectious disease demands understanding pathogen transmission. In Britain, transmission of Mycobacterium bovis from badgers (Meles meles) to cattle hinders the control of bovine tuberculosis (TB), but the mechanism of such transmission is uncertain. As badgers and cattle seldom interact directly, transmission might occur in their shared environment through contact with contamination such as faeces, urine, and saliva. We used concurrent GPS-collar tracking of badgers and cattle at four sites in Cornwall, southwest Britain, to test whether each species used locations previously occupied by the other species, within the survival time of M. bovis bacteria. Although analyses of the same dataset showed that badgers avoided cattle, we found no evidence that this avoidance persisted over time: neither GPS-collared badgers or cattle avoided space which had been occupied by the other species in the preceding 36h. Defining a contact event as an animal being located <5m from space occupied by the other species within the previous 36h, we estimated that a herd of 176 cattle (mean herd size in our study areas) would contact badgers at least 6.0 times during an average 24h period. Similarly, we estimated that a social group of 3.5 badgers (mean group size in our study areas) would contact cattle at least 0.76 times during an average night. Such frequent successive use of the same shared space, within the survival time of M. bovis bacteria, could potentially facilitate M. bovis transmission via the environment.
AU  - Woodroffe,R
AU  - Donnelly,C
AU  - Chapman,K
AU  - Ham,C
AU  - Moyes,K
AU  - Stratton,N
AU  - Cartwright,S
DO  - 10.1111/jzo.12863
EP  - 142
PY  - 2021///
SN  - 0952-8369
SP  - 132
TI  - Successive use of shared space by badgers and cattle: implications for Mycobacterium bovis transmission
T2  - Journal of Zoology
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jzo.12863
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/86327
VL  - 314
ER  -
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