China's emissions estimates don't add upthis week in Nature Climate Change, Guan, an expert in sustainability science at the University of Leeds, UK,
The uncertainties have been as large as 20%3. Guan s study is the first close, systematic look that is based on official energy figures.
Guan says that it probably arises because regional data compilers are under pressure from two forces:
says Guan. Zhu Liu, a co-author of the report, from the Institute of Applied Ecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenyang,
Guan says that the widening gap could be explained partially by rapid economic development, especially in western provinces,
But Guan says that such efforts must be based on solid baseline figures. He and his colleagues are now trying to refine estimates of coal-based emissions,
used for freezing semen for the artificial insemination of cattle in the highlands. By commandeering one tank,
Santiago had pigs and goats. Pinta had goats, but only for 20  years. Espa  ola had goats for probably 100  years,
she says.""That s what makes Galapagos so much fun. One of the most fascinating populations lives around Wolf volcano at the northern tip of the island of Isabela.
Over the past decade, Adalgisa Caccone, a geneticist at Yale university in New haven, Connecticut, and her colleagues have been unpicking the ancestry of this mixed-up population.
and livestock provide ripe conditions for endemic zoonotic diseases to arise and spread, the study says.
says Delia Grace, a veterinary epidemiologist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Nairobi,
Livestock provides poor families with up to half their income and 6-35%of their protein intake.
Demand for livestock products such as meat and milk is rising across the globe and could offer poor farmers a route out of poverty as markets expand,
For example, the study estimates that one in eight livestock animals in poor countries are affected by brucellosis,
reducing milk and meat production in cattle by 8%.In addition, 27%of livestock in developing countries showed signs of current
or past infection with bacterial food-borne disease. The latest research will help direct efforts
where farmers fear they will lose their livestock without receiving compensation if they report cases of disease."
Pig fever sweeps across Russiarussian authorities have incinerated tens of thousands of pigs and closed roads in the past few weeks,
in an attempt to contain an emerging outbreak of African swine fever, a viral disease so lethal to the animals that it has been likened to Ebola.
the Russian Federation lost 300,000 of the country s 19 million pigs to swine fever, at an estimated cost of about 7. 6  billion  roubles (US$240  million).
African swine fever was detected also for the first time in Ukraine in late July, and European and Asian countries are on the alert to deal with outbreaks that could cost their pork industries billions of dollars.
Scientists first encountered African swine fever in the 1920s in domestic pigs in Kenya, where the vicious haemorrhagic fever felled nearly every animal infected.
which is carried also by warthogs and ticks without causing disease, is now endemic in much of Sub-saharan africa,
limiting pig farming there. It does not infect humans. In 1957, the virus jumped to Portugal after pigs near Lisbon s airport were fed infected human food scraps (the virus particles can survive meat curing processes.
It then hit Spain, and import of the region s ham including the coveted jam  n ibã rico was banned by many countries,
says Linda Dixon, an expert on African swine fever at the Institute for Animal health in Pirbright, UK.
before fanning out across Russia (see Pig plague). Source: C. Netherton/OIETHE recent spread of the virus means that the Ukrainian outbreak,
now under control after authorities culled 208 pigs and instituted quarantine measures, did not come as a surprise,
home to more than 1 Â billion pigs. China also risks importing the virus through its growing trade with African nations.
Europe s large pig farms are buffered by better biosecurity and hygiene practices. But agencies such as the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural affairs in London are
The variety of ways in which African swine fever spreads only increases the uncertainty. Pigs can leave virus particles on transport vehicles,
for example, exposing whole shipments of uninfected animals. Biosecurity measures, such as scrubbing trucks and decontaminating farmers before they enter
and leave pig pens, can help to contain outbreaks. But infected wild boar, whose populations stretch across Russia
and Europe, pose a transmission threat that is harder to control.""Boars don t require visas to move across borders,
says Lubroth. The pigs food can also carry the virus if it includes contaminated pork products.
Swill feeding, in which pigs are fed scraps of human food waste, is popular among small-scale farmers.
Limiting this practice (which is banned in the European union) or heat-sterilizing the food scraps can prevent disease transmission,
He had a cooker with a big pan of entrails that he was feeding to pigs
and he had a little tray of disinfectant outside the pig pens. The FAO warns that continued spread of African swine fever could be very costly Russia does not export its pork,
but trade restrictions could prove expensive for other countries where the disease becomes endemic.""If you are a small producer,
and you lose all your five pigs, that is devastating to the family. Denis Kolbasov, director of the National Research Institute for Veterinary Virology and Microbiology of Russia in Pokrov, says that officials often have little appetite for expensive countermeasures such as widespread culling
and you lose all your five pigs, that is devastating to the family, says Lubroth.""That is the situation I see in many parts of Europe and Africa.
African swine fever was especially costly in South Ossetia during a 2008 conflict with Georgia,
and relied on livestock for food and income. While animal health officials focus on containing the spread of African swine fever,
scientists believe that it should be possible to develop a vaccine to eradicate the disease.
The lucky few pigs that survive infection are rendered immune, so Dixon s lab and others are working to identify which of the virus s 175
And the white-lipped peccary, a species closely related to pigs, has been completely wiped out there, the assessment shows.
"In most places, jaguars, tapirs, woolly spider-monkeys and white-lipped peccaries weren t even in living memory,
Swine-flu alert The number of reported cases in an outbreak of H3n2v virus a variant strain of swine flu that can pass from pigs to humans took a sudden spike last week.
and all are the result of contact with pigs by farmers or through agricultural fairs.
Farmers and ranchers can currently use ABC loans to buy cattle and remove tree stumps from recently deforested land.
why shouldn t I allow the rancher to have more heads of cattle per hectare as well?
Officials act to secure cattle-plague virusrinderpest, a devastating cattle disease, has not been seen in the wild for a decade,
Rinderpest is as deadly to cattle as highly pathogenic H5n1 avian flu is to chickens. In past decades, outbreaks ripped through herds and wiped out up to 90%of animals, often leaving famine,
cattle don t catch measles and humans don t catch rinderpest. Understanding why this is so could provide insight into the pathology and basic biology of viruses,
whether vaccines can be developed against another related virus, the sheep and goat disease called peste des petits ruminants,
Need for flu surveillance reiteratedthe emergence of the H1n1 influenza virus that leapt from pigs to humans in 2009,
reminded us of the need to monitor animals such as pigs that can host the development of dangerous viral strains.
and his colleagues have isolated a new strain of H1n2 influenza from Korean pigs that kills infected ferrets the model animal of choice for influenza work
and can spread through the air 1."It shows that there are very nasty viruses being generated in swine,
"And these viruses are coming out of apparently healthy pigs. Like that responsible for the 2009 pandemic, the new strain, known as Sw/1204, is a'triple-reassortant'virus that is, one with genes from avian, swine and human flu.
Such viruses, which first appeared in North america in 1998, have been circulating in Korean pigs for at least a decade.
Choi wanted to assess the pandemic potential of Korean strains. His team tested two H1n2
and two H3n2 viruses isolated from pig abattoirs before the 2009 pandemic. Most of these viruses did not cause any signs of serious disease in ferrets.
and spread among swine. The HA225G mutation allows the virus to bind more effectively to receptors in the lungs of its hosts,
But he adds that humans, poultry, wild birds and other species are also important targets for surveillance,
And my administration is taking steps to limit antibiotic use for livestock. This will help ensure that antibiotics are used only address diseases and health problems
In the second report2, Philip Thornton, an agricultural scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute, headquartered in Nairobi,
which badgers can transmit to cattle (see Nature 490,317-318; 2012) but it will now take place no sooner than next summer.
the researchers the butting of sheep, goats and bison.""The lesions we were seeing were strikingly similar to those that we often see on the skulls of modern mammals that ram heads,
The team found that bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) charge each other head on; that mountain goats (Oreamos americanus) bump one another in the flanks;
and that Bison bison bison) wrestle with their horns. On the basis of these examples, Peterson and Dischler speculate that the high-domed pachycephalosaurs with parietal injuries were side-bumping like mountain goats,
and that the frontal injuries are indicative of bison-like wrestling.""It could be that we are seeing two different species bashing in different ways,
but it could also be a single dinosaur species where juveniles and adults exhibit different bashing behaviours,
says Andrew Farke, a palaeontologist at the Raymond Alf Museum of Palaeontology in Claremont, California.
In one case, James Murray, another geneticist at the University of California, Davis, was told in 2003 that the USDA had rejected his proposal to develop a goat that produces milk rich in human lysozymes enzymes that fight diarrhoeal disease
Van Eenennaam once hoped to engineer a cow that produced milk rich in omega-3 fats,
The agency now funds her work on conventional breeding techniques to create dairy cows without horns, sparing farmers the danger and expense of removing them.
The USDA supports research to improve livestock and agriculture, but a spokesperson says that it has considered not work on GE animals to be the best use of its funding.
The US National institutes of health (NIH) occasionally supports research on transgenic pigs that model human diseases, but rarely funds proposals to produce drugs or vaccines in the milk of transgenic livestock.
An NIH spokesperson says that decisions are based on many factors, including the needs of the research community.
Murray moved his goat project to Brazil, where the government funds his research; the childhood diarrhoea that the goats milk is intended to treat is a serious problem in the north of the country.
And China invested nearly $800 million in transgenic pigs, cattle, sheep and crops between 2008 and 2012, says Ning Li, director of the State Key Laboratories for Agrobiotechnology in Beijing.
More than 20 GE food animals are in development in China, he says, including a fast-growing carp and cows that produce milk with reduced allergenic potential.
However, a Chinese researcher who asked to remain anonymous because he did not have permission to speak to the press predicts that approval for the animals will lag
it is a menace that infects their cattle with bovine tuberculosis (TB). The disease, caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium bovis,
and can infect cows through direct and indirect contact, and years of research and tens of millions of pounds have gone into studying
cattle are screened routinely and infected animals are destroyed. And, uncomfortable as it is for animal-lovers, killing large numbers of badgers does help to reduce levels of bovine TB.
He adds that controlling cattle movements and increasing TB screening on farms would have a greater impact.
One of those animals, a cow, secretes milk that lacks an allergy-inducing protein because researchers accurately blocked its production using the technique of RNA interference1.
And in pigs, scientists have used an enzyme called a TALEN2 to scramble a gene that would normally help remove cholesterol.
For years, researchers tried to remove the allergy-inducing milk protein beta-lactoglobulin from cow's milk
They inserted DNA encoding a version of this microrna into the genome to create genetically modified cow embryos that they hoped would grow into cows without the allergen in their milk.
Out of 100 embryos, one calf yielded beta-globulin-free milk.""This isn t a quick process,
That's why it has taken so long to succeed in making an allergen-free cow, he says.
who contributed to the work in pigs.""In essence, we are just mimicking an evolutionary process with precise, man-made editors.
Pigs with this condition may be reliable models of human atheroscelerosis in biomedical research. The TALEN-modified pig is not the first model of human heart disease (see Model pigs face a messy path),
but the technique makes genetic engineering less costly and more efficient.""I d be exaggerating if
I said that pigs and cows can now be thought of as big mice, but we are moving in that direction,
says Heiner Niemann, a bioengineer at the Institute of Farm animal Genetics in Neustadt, Germany. The excitement surrounding these technological advances is bittersweet, however.
Wagner says he has tasted not the milk from his special cow because he s not permitted to under New zealand law."
Pig geneticists go the whole hogt. J. Tabasco is something of a porcine goddess at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where her ruddy,
For the past couple of decades they have been slowly teasing information from the pig genome,
applying it to breed healthier and meatier pigs, and to try to create more faithful models of human disease.
and perhaps even allow pigs to be engineered to provide organs for transplant into human patients."
"The pig industry has an excellent track record for rapid adoption of new technologies and knowledge.
T. J.,a domestic Duroc pig (Sus scrofa domesticus), was born in Illinois in 2001. The next year, Schook and his colleagues generated a fibroblast cell line from a small piece of skin from her ear
One set of clones was created at the National Swine Resource and Research center (NSRRC) in Columbia, Missouri,
along with genetically engineered pigs with genes added or deleted to mimic human diseases.""Making such pigs has got increasingly easier as knowledge of the genome increases,
says physiologist Randall Prather, a co-director of the NSRRC, which is funded by the National institutes of health (NIH).
Geneticist Martien Groenen, part of the team that sequenced the pig genome, chews the fat with Thea Cunningham.
The NIH launched the NSRRC in 2003 to encourage research in pig disease models. Pigs are more expensive to keep than rodents,
and they reproduce more slowly. But the similarities between pig and human anatomy and physiology can trump the drawbacks.
For example, their eyes are a similar size, with photoreceptors similarly distributed in the retina. So the pig became the first model for retinitis pigmentosa, a cause of blindness.
And four years ago, researchers created a pig model of cystic fibrosis2 that unlike mouse models, developed symptoms resembling those in humans.
Geneticist and veterinarian Eckhard Wolf at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, has exploited the similarity between the human
and pig gastrointestinal system and metabolism like us, pigs will eat almost anything and then suffer for it to develop models of diabetes.
One pig model carries a mutant transgene that limits the effectiveness of incretin, a hormone required for normal insulin secretion3.
Mice with the transgene developed unexpectedly severe diabetes, but the pigs have a more subtle pre-diabetic condition that better models the human disease."
"This shows the importance of using an animal with a relevant physiology, says Wolf. Pig models are now being developed for other common conditions,
including Alzheimer s disease, cancer and muscular dystrophy. This work will be enriched by the discovery, reported in the genome paper,
Knowledge of the genome is also allowing scientists to try to engineer pigs that could be the source of organs,
Pig organs are roughly the right size, and researchers hope to create transgenic pigs carrying genes that deceive the immune system of recipients into not rejecting the transplants.
Back on the farm early knowledge about the pig genome led to the discovery in 1991 of a gene involved in porcine stress syndrome, in
which the stress of overheating, being moved or even having sex causes the animals to die suddenly4.
It then became possible to test for the gene and select pig stocks free of it.
a viral disease costing the US pig industry US$600 Â million per year. The PRRS Host Genetics Consortium, a network of US research groups
But the pig genome is not just about applications. Lead co-author Martien Groenen, a genome researcher from Wageningen University in The netherlands, has resequenced the genomes of scores of different strains of wild and domestic pigs,
and used the information to show that the pig was domesticated independently in Asia and Europe.
He has started also to work out which genes were involved in the selection of desired traits such as a longer spine to give more bacon on different continents."
milk from the cattle that they had begun to herd. Peter Bogucki, an archaeologist at Princeton university in New jersey, was in the 1980s among the first to suspect that cheese-making might have been afoot in Europe as early as 5
He noticed that archaeologists working at ancient cattle-rearing sites in what is had now Poland found pieces of ceramic vessels riddled with holes, reminiscent of cheese strainers.
Discovery of goat facility adds to antibody provider's woesa herd of 841 goats has kicked up a stir for one of the world s largest antibody suppliers after US agricultural officials found the animals including 12
A tip-off led inspectors on 31 october to the remote barn, where they found the additional goats,
including the subject 841 goats. The company says that it intends to resolve the dispute
and some but not all of the sick goats are receiving appropriate medical treatment and monitoring
Since the 1980s, the use of nitrogen fertilizers and the number of livestock have doubled, whereas coal consumption has increased more than 3-fold and the number of motor vehicles more than 20-fold.
"80%of the nitrogen in crops grown globally goes to feed livestock, says Sutton. Higher consumption of meat and diary products, especially in developed countries, has increased substantially global nitrogen pollution."
says Mark Springer, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside. For example, grouping animals according to their anatomy alone puts physically similar species such as pangolins, anteaters and aardvarks in the same tight group,
but Springer says that the lack of genetic data for extinct species adds uncertainty to their position on the tree,
Scientists coaxed a clone of an extinct ibex from Spain to birth from a special hybrid goat.
but tens of thousands of tests in poultry and other animals elsewhere have failed so far to turn up significant levels of the virus. It is far from easy to devise effective ways to sample birds and animals for testing in a country with some 6 billion domestic birds
and 0. 5 billion pigs not to mention a vast population of wild birds, including many migratory species
For H5n1, researchers integrate large data sets that combine information on many potentially important factors, such as poultry trade routes,
they add the distribution of H5n1 cases in poultry, and as well as positive H5n1 results from active surveillance in markets.
density in 2010), pigs (B), chickens (C) and ducks (D) in China and Asia in general.
Livestock densities are modelled numbers of animals per square kilometre standardized to 2006 national totals. Note different scale for pigs.
H7n9 case locations courtesy of EMPRES, FAO, Rome. Human population from ASIAPOP. Source: Map supplied by T. P. Robinson, G r. W. Wint, G. Conchedda, T. P. Van Boeckel, V. Ercoli, E. Palamara, G. Cinardi, L. D
An international team of researchers compiled maps for Nature showing the population densities of chickens, pigs, ducks and humans in many parts of China and throughout Asia.
47 million domestic ducks and 22 million pigs live within a 50-kilometre radius of each of the 60 H7n9 human cases that had occurred up to 16 april.
or control because it does not cause serious illness in poultry and other birds has been reinforced by the new cases in Beijing and Henan province.
In the case of H5n1, outbreaks in poultry precede human outbreaks and tell public health workers where the public health threat lies.
But despite intensive surveillance of poultry, wild birds, pigs and other animals, the animal reservoirs remain largely unknown.
The virus may have reached Beijing and Henan provinces via the poultry trade which is extensive in China,
that H7n9 has been spreading silently in poultry or other animals over a far greater geographical area than thought.
and home to some 6 billion poultry as well as many migratory and other wild birds that may have a role in spreading the virus. On Wednesday,
Despite the difficulties of detecting H7n9 in poultry and birds, Martin remains optimistic that so long as the virus does not start to spread among humans the potential number of human cases can be curtailed by taking urgent tough measures such as keeping poultry flocks away from wild birds
and people and restructuring its live bird markets. Â It's too soon to say how big a threat H7n9 poses
They are testing wild birds and thousands of domestic fowl; analysing the viruses they find; and trying to trace people who have been exposed to infected patients.
some patients had contact with poultry or other animals just before falling ill, whereas others had Not late last week,
and that they occasionally jump into poultry flocks. Kwok-Yung Yuen, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Hong kong, notes the proximity of the reported human cases to the Yangtze river delta
whether it could become established in poultry, creating a reservoir that might lead to continued, sporadic human infections.
It would be next to impossible to detect H7n9 through routine surveillance for sick poultry among China s 6 Â billion domestic birds."
Emerging preliminary analyses of the genome of the virus point to the possible spectre of a pathogen that might spread silently in poultry without causing serious disease.
including poultry, in Asia and elsewhere. More specifically, the sequences appear similar to recent H9n2 viruses found in China and South korea.
which was a mix of viruses that infect birds, pigs and humans. Most of the genetic analyses are still being carried out confidentially within THE WHO's global flu-research networks.
such as the H5n1 virus that has been ravaging poultry flocks in Asia since late 2002. Flu viruses that don t sicken birds can,
It could be spreading in poultry undetected and thus could create a reservoir of infection that would lead to frequent sporadic human infections that crop up without warning.
H7 viruses are common in wild birds but much less so in poultry. It therefore seems unlikely that three human cases in such a short space of time could result from contact with wild birds
Domestic fowl are the most likely alternative source of the virus . But given that H7n9 has mutations that enable it to infect mammals,
pigs might be another source, says Tashiro. Flu experts say that other urgent requirements include testing any human cases of serious pneumonia for traces of the virus
The foxes on Mednyi Island one of Russia s Commander Islands in the Bering sea are a subspecies of Arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) that may have remained isolated for thousands of years.
But Dominique Berteaux, an Arctic ecologist at the University of Quebec in Rimouski, Canada, cautions that the team has not definitively proved a link between mercury contamination
for example rather than on livestock for food. Medical applications of GM technology do not stir consumer passions in the same way as GM foods,
in 2009, the FDA approved a goat that makes an anti-clotting drug in its milk.
because we will have increasing TB in our cattle, increasing TB in our wildlife, and that will cause spillover of TB to other livestock, to potentially domestic animals and potentially to humans.
In the process of doing something about it we have to use all the tools we have in the toolbox available to us.
That includes cattle movement controls, increasing biosecurity, development of vaccines and control of the wildlife reservoir.
and showed the effect that sustained removal of badgers can have on reducing bovine tuberculosis in cattle.
Whether those vectors are cattle or badgers and the susceptibles are cattle or badgers doesn t matter.
It s the badger-cattle interface we need to understand. And if we understand that well,
then we can start to manage it. I would also point to vaccines as well. Vaccines, at the end of the day, are going to be
Clearly reducing wildlife populations and killing cattle is not going to actually produce the elimination that we re really striving for.
We re already moving as rapidly as we can towards getting a vaccine for cattle.
This isn t just about badgers and cattle. It s about badgers cattle and farmers. And other members of the public as well they have choices to make.
We have to understand those social dynamics as much as we have to understand the epidemiological dynamics of the disease.
and some farmers will trade cattle out of the high-probability TB areas into the low-probability TB areas,
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