University of Cambridge

As its name suggests, African Horse Sickness (AHS) is associated with the continent of Africa, where it is feared as a deadly disease. It has long been assumed by British veterinarians and horse-owners that the disease, which is carried by midges, could not spread to cooler northern climates.

But researchers now think that its arrival in northern Europe could be only a matter of time – and perhaps more importantly, that it could spread if it did arrive.

A study undertaken by scientists at the University of Cambridge Department of Veterinary Medicine, in collaboration with the Animal Health Trust and The Pirbright Institute, shows how dangerous it could be for the horse and pony population if AHS was introduced into the UK. The research also identified which regions would be worst hit at different times of the year. 

This information could be vital to strategies for coping with an outbreak if it arrived. The study also emphasises the importance of the continued exclusion of the disease.

The research was led by Dr Gianni Lo Iacono, a multidisciplinary scientist whose expertise lies in the mathematical modelling of a range of problems related to the interface between biology and physics. He worked with a team of colleagues from complementary fields including Professor James Wood, a renowned specialist in infectious diseases.

Most strikingly, East Anglia emerges from the study as the region that is most vulnerable to AHS spread which could occur if the disease was not identified early enough for action to be taken to contain it.

In Africa, the disease is spread by infected insects from species of midge known as Culicoides imicola, which carry the African Horse Sickness virus, an orbivirus of the family Reoviridae. Once a horse is infected by AHS, there is no treatment and no cure: the animal will have a high fever within 24 hours and most infected animals will be dead within 48 hours.

Other equidae, zebras and donkeys, are susceptible to AHS infection but do not have such severe disease. Infected zebras do not exhibit any apparent symptoms: as seemingly healthy animals they are potentially lethal carriers. Donkeys develop symptoms but can survive the disease.

First recorded references of AHS occurred in 1327 in Yemen, and in the mid-1600s following the introduction of horses to southern Africa. The disease was clearly identified by the British Army in South Africa 150 years ago when scores of cavalry horses perished in an epidemic.

Ever since, European horse owners have taken comfort from the fact that the disease could not strike in cooler countries. The British climate was considered too cold for the Culicoides imicola midges to survive. On top of this, the UK (and Europe more generally) has protective mechanisms in place that prohibit horses from Africa entering the country.

A growing number of veterinarians now believe that AHS can now arrive in the UK. Well-documented outbreaks were reported in Morocco (1965, 1989–1991), Spain (1987, 1988,1990) and Portugal (1989). The British climate is warming and global transportation of perishable fresh goods – such as flowers and vegetables – offers a possible route for infected midges to enter the country.

The prospect of AHS brings sharply into focus the need for greater research into ways of preventing an incursion of AHS – and ways to cope in the event of an outbreak. “Our work demonstrates that there is no place for complacency about the ability of the virus to spread here,” said Professor Wood. 

A greater understanding of AHS requires a multi-stranded approach covering the behaviour and life cycle of the midge and the geographical distribution and movement of horses, plus possible routes for infection to enter the country. Midge numbers and activity are highest during the warmer summer months, when the arrival of infection from overseas would be most serious.

In the UK, all horses have passports as a legal requirement but these documents record the owners’ address rather than the location where their animals are kept. If horses were mapped according to their owners address, London, for example, would emerge as the centre with the densest horse population. Clearly most horses owned by Londoners are kept outside the city, many of them within easy driving distance of their owners’ homes.

Correcting this issue posed problems. However, satellite data on land usage and a survey which recorded the distribution of distances between horses and their owners in different land-use settings (people live closer to their horses in rural areas than they do in urban areas) allowed the researchers to produce a more meaningful map of the risk of the disease. This showed that East Anglia is particularly vulnerable to an outbreak: not only is the region warm and dry, but it also has distinct clusters of horses, notably around Newmarket. 

The team has also investigated another important aspect of the disease: the possible 'dilution effect' that could be achieved through keeping animals not susceptible to the virus, such as cattle and sheep, close to horses.

Dr Lo Iacono explained: “In some communities in Africa people keep cattle or sheep near their houses in the belief that this will distract mosquitoes carrying malaria away from people. Some midges show apparent preference for cattle over sheep, so in South Africa deploying cattle to protect sheep from bluetongue (a similar disease to AHS in cattle and sheep) has been proposed as a way to control the disease. On the other hand, the presence of other species might well prove to be an added attraction for midges, exacerbating the threat to horses.”

The research re-emphasises the importance of veterinary education to allow early disease identification, which can reduce the critically important reaction times to allow optimal control.

The tools that Dr Lo Iacono has developed have potential applications in mapping and responding to the spread of other diseases, some of which are ecologically even more complex – such as Rift Valley Fever, a mosquito-borne disease that affects both humans and animals, causing a serious disease and in some cases death.

The research provides a good example of how theoretical models can identify biological knowledge gaps (identifying midge biting preferences). This is now being taken forward in other studies.

‘Where are the horses? With the sheep or cows? Uncertain host location, vector-feeding preferences and the risk of African horse sickness transmission in Great Britain’ by Giovanni Lo Iacono, Charlotte Robin, Richard Newton, Simon Gubbins, and James Wood is published by the Journal of the Royal Society, Interface  (2013) 20130194 doi:10 .1098/rsif.2013.0194  

For more information on this story contact Alex Buxton, Office of Communications, University of Cambridge amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673.

25 January 2011 was the day Egypt’s revolt began. People flooded the streets of cities across the country, calling for an end to the Mubarak regime. Two days later – in a moment unprecedented in history – the government turned off Egypt’s internet, in the hope of quelling massive civil unrest.

It didn’t work. Two weeks later Mubarak stepped down.

The Western media relished portraying the Egyptian uprising as the ‘Facebook revolution’, a digital epoch securing social media’s place in history as a vehicle for political change – an unstoppable galvanising force.

Such views were clearly oversimplistic, especially as the revolution continued apace despite – even because of – the loss of the internet. As one activist stated on his blog, losing the internet at the hands of his own government served as a powerful reminder of “why we’re doing any of this.”

So in what ways did social media influence Egyptian revolution, and how do opposition movements continue to use it? Can researchers capture these digital datasets to analyse social turbulence?

Dr Anne Alexander, a research fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), is investigating the digital fingerprints left by Egyptian people on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites during civil unrest.

“I found myself thrown into a huge amount of social media data in my research as a political scientist working on Egypt. The work I’m able to do, the kind of access I have to sources previously inaccessible outside the country – or in many cases full stop – has changed enormously.”

More than 600,000 Egyptians joined Facebook between January and February 2011. On 2 February, the day the internet switched back on, it was the most accessed website in the country. There were 1.5 million Egypt-related tweets in just the first week of the uprising.

The statistics are startling, and it’s perhaps easy to see why the Western media leapt on them. But, as Alexander points out, “it’s not Twitter that overthrew Mubarak, but mass mobilisation and burning down police stations – that’s what makes revolutions.”

Communication technologies were certainly important for Egypt’s uprising, and not just social media. Smartphones enabled protesters to capture footage of events, which were manually relayed – as networks were down – back to ‘media camps’ set up by activists in touch with outside journalists.

These clips were reported by global news agencies such as the BBC, CNN and – critically for Egyptians – Al Jazeera, the Arabic news network that was the most influential source of information for the nation, far outweighing social media.

While Twitter and Facebook contributed to initial online mobilisation, Alexander found that people she interviewed following the uprising said it was large-scale physical gatherings, rallying cries at Friday prayer and traditional activism that led to revolution.

“People attribute agency to technologies when it should be attributed to people. Facebook did not cause a ‘tipping point’. When the stakes are very high – arrest, torture, death – it takes multiple tipping points to reach crucial moments, showing enormous endurance on the part of the people,” said Alexander in a paper co-authored with Dr Miriyam Aouragh of the University of Oxford.

“You have social change colliding with technology. New media played a part as one of a number of tools used by the people, leaving a remarkable rendering of a moment in history that researchers can interrogate.” 

Recently, Alexander has been studying the ways in which Facebook in particular has been used during industrial action in post-Mubarak Egypt, to both gather and disseminate information.

Last year, public sector workers striking at many of the country’s sugar refineries used Facebook as an “online newspaper” – uploading interviews with strike committee members, media reports for comment and encouraging debate on the ‘wall’.

A common trait in online labour activism is to use Facebook’s capacity for ‘sharing’ to be transparent about contact with management. Posting all output from meetings lends credibility to industrial action.

“The process of making available all dealings with management – from documents to photos of a meeting – reflects peoples raised expectations for democratic accountability post-revolution, and social media can be a platform for this,” said Alexander.

This is particularly important for emerging independent unions as, before the revolution, the trade union federation was – and to some extent still is – an arm of the state.

Striking doctors used social media to gather reports from different provinces, setting up national Facebook pages to channel information, but also to lobby – both the government for increased funding and the wider public for support.

Explanatory videos and leaflets for doctors to distribute among patients were circulated via Facebook, using social media as “essentially a form of PR.”

Some of the most intense debate Alexander encountered in her research has been on constitutional reform in Egypt, as the Muslim Brotherhood – who use a “well- developed ecosystem” of social media – have risen to prominence in the country.

Those opposed have taken to the streets but also to “every social media platform going” and Alexander is able to access voices and opinions that would have been difficult 10 years ago, with “extremely rich” content attached.

For Alexander, social media offers huge opportunities but also challenges. “You have to maintain critical detachment, know the questions and approaches that will help unpick what’s presented – as with any source material.”

The remote access to often thousands of viewpoints, tracking development of events seemingly in ‘real time’ from people on the ground, has unquestionably transformed the ability to research political movements, as well as the movements themselves.

But analysis of social media raises important questions about truth and identity that Alexander finds “disconcerting”.

“The multiplicity of viewpoints, this sense of a godlike panoptical vision that social media seems to provide – offering near-instantaneous presence to events on the other side of the world – can be deceptive.”

As Alexander highlighted, most people who have tried to tweet while evading tear gas will tell you “it’s not instantaneous at all!” and what they choose to share – the viewpoint expressed to the world as fact – is highly selective.

“The digital self has an inevitable aspect of performance, something you’re ‘putting on’ for the outside world, as I’ve discovered through interviews.”  

For Alexander, it is critical to ‘triangulate’ when using social media as a source by combining it with interviews both remotely and face to face.

As emerging fields of digital anthropology and ethnography become increasingly valuable for researchers, tools and approaches will need to be developed – as well as ethical boundaries. “I’m not convinced people understand the extent to which what they say is public, and may put them in harm’s way – now or in a few years,” said Alexander.

“Social media allows access to datasets with an unprecedented range of detail, but presents a host of new challenges for researchers. It’s possible to ask questions in new ways but whether social media data can really transform our understanding of society remains to be seen.”

For more information, please contact fred.lewsey@admin.cam.ac.uk

A new book co-authored by Professor Barbara Sahakian explores ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ decision-making and the possible improvement of bad or risky decisions with cognitive enhancing drugs. The book, 'Bad Moves: How decision making goes wrong and the ethics of smart drugs', co-authored with Jamie Nicole LaBuzetta, also discusses the increasing lifestyle use of ‘smart drugs’ by healthy people.

Professor Sahakian says the role of emotions in decision-making is not fully understood, but that knowledge about it is increasing. For example, she says, we know that we have to exert cognitive control by our prefrontal cortex over emotional areas of the brain such as the amygdala in order to have good emotional regulation. We also know that there are two forms of decision making: ‘hot’ cognition, which includes emotional and risky decisions, and ‘cold’ cognition, which includes rational or non-emotional decisions.

She says: “Understanding the differences between these two forms of cognition can help us to further discover how emotions are involved in decision making.” In healthy students, an example of ‘hot’ decision-making could be opting to go out the night before an exam which could affect their exam grade. An example of a problem of ‘hot’ cognition could be highly risky behaviour such as when a patient who is in the manic phase of bipolar disorder maxes out their credit cards. In contrast, ‘cold’ cognition might include such decisions as how to organise your day in the most effective way or deciding on ingredients for a meal.

She will be speaking about her research for ‘Bad Moves’ as part of the Cambridge series of talks at this year's Hay Festival. Professor Sahakian directs a laboratory of psychopharmacology at the University of Cambridge which uses cognitive enhancing drugs (‘smart drugs’) and psychological treatments to improve cognition, including decision-making, in patients with psychiatric disorders including Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), mania and depression.

Her aim is to improve the ability of patients to function successfully in their daily living at school, university, work or home, and to have a better quality of life and wellbeing. Given that 16% of people in the UK have a common mental health problem, such as depression, she feels it is important that there is a better understanding of difficulties people face which hopefully may lead to reduced stigmatisation.

She also has a strong interest in the safety and ethical issues with regard to the increasing lifestyle use of ‘smart drugs’ by healthy people. In particular, she is concerned about safety as there are no long term studies of the use of ‘smart drugs’ in healthy people. Another concern is the accessing of these ‘smart drugs’ over the Internet. Furthermore, there are ethical issues involved in the use of these drugs by healthy people, such as coercion, ‘cheating’ in competitive situations such as exams and the impact this will have on our society. These issues need to be discussed by an informed public.

*“Bad moves. How decision making goes wrong and the ethics of smart drugs” by Barbara J Sahakian and Jamie Nicole LaBuzetta is published by Oxford University Press.