Hooo-Hooo Volume 11 Nr 1 | Page 26

WildLife Group of the SAVA global and local public health and economies. Leading drivers of infectious disease emergence in humans from wildlife include anthropogenic pressures such as land use change, food production systems, and trade and travel. These complex drivers require broad and novel approaches to predicting and preventing disease emergence. A multisectoral or One Health approach that considers the human-animal- environment links can promote synergies among public health, veterinary and medical professions with other disciplines. For example, wildlife health and pathogen surveillance can allow for more proactive identification of risks for zoonotic pathogen emergence and transmission, and mapping of disease hotspots and disease forecasting can help inform areas of greatest risk to guide resource allocation for prevention efforts. Ecological and evolutionary perspectives can provide insight on pathogen ecology to guide control strategies, and social scientists can help identify factors that lead to practices that increase or decrease disease transmission risk. The prevalence of tuberculosis in domesticated African elephant (Loxodonta africana) and their handlers in the Victoria Falls and Livingstone area Hanyire T.G. 1,2 , Foggin C. ³, Miller M.⁴, van Kooten P.⁵, Morar-Leather D.1, Rutten V. 1,5 and Michel A.1 1 Department Veterinary Tropical Diseases, Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Pretoria, Onderstepoort, South Africa, e-mail:tghanyire@gmail. com; 2 Department of Veterinary Field Services, Wildlife Veterinary Unit, Harare, Zimbabwe; 3 Victoria Falls Wildlife Trust, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe; ⁴Stellenbosch University, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences; 5 Department of Infectious Diseases and Immunology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Rationale: Tuberculosis (Tb) in elephants is a chronic disease, most often caused by M. tuberculosis, and infected animals show little or no clinical signs 26 until the disease is in its advanced stages. There are currently no validated diagnostic assays for Tb in elephants and those currently used appear to have suboptimal sensitivity or specificity. This urges for the establishment of an affordable and sensitive diagnostic algorithm able to detect Tb in elephants at an early stage. Objectives: To determine the presence or absence of tuberculosis in the elephant population under study usi