ILRI PhD Graduate Fellowship: Assessing wildlife value chain in Vietnam 2022

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) seeks to recruit a PhD graduate fellow to work on assessing wildlife value chain and interspecies transmission risk of zoonotic diseases using a One Health approach in Vietnam. The successful fellow will be hosted at the Animal and Human Health (AHH) program at ILRI.

ILRI works to improve food and nutritional security and reduce poverty in developing countries through research for efficient, safe and sustainable use of livestock. It is the only one of 15 CGIAR research centers dedicated entirely to animal agriculture research for the developing world. Co-hosted by Kenya and Ethiopia, it has regional or country offices in East, South and Southern Asia as well as Central, East, Southern and West Africa.

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The AHH program seeks to effectively manage or eliminate livestock, zoonotic and food-borne diseases that matter to the poor through the generation and use of knowledge, technologies and products, leading to higher farmer incomes and better health and nutrition for consumers and livestock.

Wildlife farming and trade has grown into a multimillion industry in Vietnam. It primarily supplies food, income and other livelihoods to many communities, and supplements food production gaps from the livestock industry in other areas. One of the biggest threats of this occupation, however, is its potential to serve as a source of novel zoonotic pathogens. Published studies show that up to 75% of all emerging diseases are zoonoses, with most of these being associated with wildlife. Such novel zoonoses often cause huge health and socioeconomic impacts. Examples of novel zoonotic pathogens that recently emerged from wildlife include Ebola, SARS, SARS-CoV-2, Nipah virus and highly pathogenic avian influenza.

Depending on biosafety and biosecurity practices used to prevent cross contamination, wildlife farms, slaughterhouses or markets could serve as contact nodes from where zoonotic pathogens spillover to the human population. It is important therefore to characterize practices involved in wild meat production and marketing, identify nodes where humans, domestic animals and wildlife interface and quantify risk of spillovers to inform targeted surveillance and response.

ILRI is recruiting a PhD fellow to develop and implement a risk assessment framework founded on the One Health approach along wildlife meat value chains to determine the magnitude of this problem. The fellow will also analyze biological samples that were collected recently from these value chains to determine the prevalence of selected zoonotic pathogens in these chains. S/he will work with a team of researchers with a wealth of expertise on emerging infectious diseases (EIDs), food safety and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) work.

This PhD position is part of the CGIAR Research Initiative on protecting human health through a One Health approach. The aim of the initiative is to protect human health by improving the prevention, detection and control of zoonoses, foodborne diseases and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in low- and middle-income countries. The initiative will work in seven countries: Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Côte d’Ivoire, India, Bangladesh and Vietnam.