Good evening everyone, and thank you for joining us for tonight's BCVA webinar. My name is Sarah Peterson from the BCVA board and I'll be chairing the webinar tonight. Our speaker, Ian Richards is happy to take questions, so please type any that you may have in the Q&A box during the webinar and I'll save your questions for the end of the presentation.

If you have any technical difficulties, then we've got webinar vet on hand to help us with those. So please, type any queries that you have or any problems that you're having in the Q&A box, and we will do our best to assist you. If you can't see the Q&A box, if you move your mouse, then the taskbar should come visible at the bottom of the screen.

So it's my pleasure to introduce Ian Richards as tonight's speaker. Ian qualified from Liverpool and in his own words, says, as all the best vets do. He spent most of his practise life in mixed practise, developing interests and gaining certificates in anaesthesia and sheep health.

After leaving practise to become a house husband, he took an online master's in conservation Medicine at the 2nd best vet school, he says, Edinburgh. This work rekindled his his interest in natural history and led to a greater understanding of the interaction of ecosystems, wildlife and diseases in animals and man. He currently works as a locum and is looking to establish a consultancy business in the area he refers to as veterinary ecology.

This puts him in an ideal place to talk to us tonight, and he's gonna give us the opportunity to look into the world of veterinary ecology through his presentation on conservation medicine and ecosystem health, or the life, the universe and everything. So now to hand over to Ian. Thank you, Sarah, and good evening everybody.

Yes, so Sarah's gone from that introduction, you probably heard her pause and stumble over the placings of Liverpool at #1, Edinburgh at #2, but we all have our own preferences. Those of you who don't know me, I qualified quite some time ago. I spent most of my time northwest of England, mixed practise.

And yes, special interest in a couple of things. And I came out of the practise. My wife is a clinical oncologist, and she was developing her medical career.

So I decided I'd be the one looking after the children. And I've done some nice bits of locum work. Working on the island of Mull was an absolute delight.

And then some kits in the Caribbean, yes, in the Caribbean. One of those nice gigs, Life drops in your lap every now and then. The sheep vets allowed me to look after the shop for a while, so that was how I, I've been spending my time.

And then when it's raining, I've been getting this little lady on the road, she is now fully operational, it's been nice having this lovely weather to drive around in. And I got into this course because of a broad mind. I wasn't doing very much.

I needed something to do. And I had a chat with one of my farming clients. Now, he farms here.

This is the valley of Long Sledd just in the sort of northeast of Kendall, moving up into the lakes. And I go here to do a little bit of deer stalking. And if they can just hover the mouse over this little brown area in the middle of the valley, where we've got a whole pile of rushes that have grown on what should normally be the nice green.

The river sprint runs along here, and is a triple SI because of white clawed crayfish, the endangered crayfish in the UK, which means that Natural England said to the farmers, you can't clear the exits of the land drains that enter into the river. As a consequence, the water's backed up, and we've now got more rushes and in consequence, more fluke. So this was the thing, how do you talk to the ecologist in natural England?

So I thought I'd find a bit more. It's got to be an online course, because of the family, and unfortunately a lot of them are a little bit simplistic, until I found the Edinburgh Conservation Medicine. As a master's, this was more than I wanted to do really.

But I gave it a go starting in 2013, and as I had time, I thought, I know, I'll do two years together. Well, I abandoned the 2nd year, not because it was too much work, which it was, but because it was just too interesting. The concepts of ecology and ecosystem health that we'll go on to were just so intriguing that I wanted to spend my time really looking into them.

And it took me full circle. I became a vet because of an interest in natural history as we used to call it. So 3 years masters, and the 3rd year of my thesis was in fascilosis, and some of you may have heard me talk at sheep that meetings on this.

And I keep repeating this, one of the most interesting effective CPD sessions I've had a really well structured course, lovely. So I'll run through what conservation medicine is and how it fits into one health and the concept of ecosystem health, why it's important for vets and for other people. And actually, can we use it in normal practise?

We'll run through some of the, the case examples as well. Perhaps worth thinking about what conservation is. It's a means by which ecosystem resources can be available in the future.

That's, that's quite important. And it's important to realise it is not preservation, because an ecosystem has to change, it has to evolve, that's evolution. That's how the whole planet became what it is.

And I'm not being too sardonic by saying that rewilding is a bit of a conceit, but it is, because a lot of people are after a, a sort of return to the what they call the wildwood for the UK and there's debate as to whether that ever existed. So they have an imagined point that they want to preserve, rather than using what is conservation, which is an evolving and changing world. The downside, most of the problems are anthropogenic in origin.

We are the cause of most of the problems, we can't deny that. It's an emerging discipline, and it grew from the people who were involved in the small or large scale conservation projects, everything from sort of looking after threatened red squirrels in the UK to translocating rhinoceroses and elephants in Africa. This was done by biologists, zoologists, not vets.

The vets were there darting or taking samples or maybe treating the odd individual animal. So there was this impasse. The zoologists knew nothing about disease and the vets knew nothing about ecology, so they kind of got together.

And you've seen these triads pretty well everywhere with one health, I'm sure, ecosystem health, human health, animal health. That's a nicer one. I like that one because this conservation medicine book is a really good book if you're interested in this topic, this is excellent.

You might even be able to download this free. I picked up a Twitter feed, I think it's Wiley putting an awful lot of books out on PDFs free at the moment, so grab them while you can. What is it?

Three definitions that I've pulled out of different areas. The bottom one, the application of one health principles, the conservation of biodiversity is a pretty good definition of what conservation medicine is, or certainly how I understand it. And we'll talk a lot about biodiversity throughout this presentation.

One Health, it gets conflated with it, it's part of it, and I'm sure again you're familiar with these things. There's the OIE definition of it. And then rather a nice one from Sweden, the sort of umbrella.

There's so many different aspects to one health, and you've got veterinary medicine up right up there, public health, human medicine. So many different things. There's a few missing, but you get the idea.

One Health is a fairly modern development, late 1900s, leading to the 12 Manhattan Principles. I always think Manhattan Principles is a bit of a curious one, the Manhattan Project, of course, being the atomic bomb. And this led 2011, 1st International One Health Congress.

And yet, that record and the BMJ were there in 2005. Credit's got to go to Martin Adler, the previous. Editor of the record for really pushing this one forward, and we are due to get another joint version.

I think Corona has made a bit of a mess of it, but one is, is, is certainly well overdue. And it's probably easy to say one health is after better public health, food safety, zoonosis, antimicrobial resistance. It is terribly anthropocentric, and from a personal point of view, I get a little disappointed about the conflation of one health with improved mental health simply by being out of doors.

That to me isn't a one health project at all. Which came first, just to be silly, well, the vets did, of course, we always thrashed the medics at rugby. Chiron, the centaur, that's this chap here, he's, he taught Etepius, the god of medicine, so yeah.

Ecosystem health, it came about around about the same sort of time, this paper from David Report. And ecosystems, as I mentioned earlier on, they change, they evolve, they're fluid entities. But some, say a lake or an island, can be relatively defined.

And what David was noting was the mass mortalities die off of species within the lakes and started to wonder, were there any indicators of predictors of what might be happening and can we prevent it. And came to the conclusion that one indicator of a healthy ecosystem is one with high biodiversity, biodiversity is a combination of species richness and species number. And when you look at ecosystem health, you're looking to differentiate the healthy from the sick, you look at the vital stand signs.

Has it got a capacity to recover from the stress or the change, regardless of where that's coming from? And can you identify risk factors before a crisis? Now I suspect some of you are slightly ahead of the next slide and realising that this is what we do on a day to day basis.

We'll see an individual sick cow or sheep, LDA something like that, you'll take, look for the clinical signs. At a herd level, poor conception rates, you'll do pretty much similar things, you'll be examining for data. At the farm level, you'll be considering what parasites, what fields are high risk parasites.

An organism is an ecosystem. There's an awful lot talked about the microbiome at the moment, an awful lot of it's complete tosh, I'm afraid. But both have got homeostatic mechanisms.

They can be healthy, they can be sick, they can recover, and there are risk factors of both of them. So, as a vet, it's often quite easy to grasp this concept of ecosystem health. It simply is applying all the stuff we've learned, but at a landscape level.

Now I mentioned biodiversity and biodiversity loss as a, as a sign of ecosystem change, and these are the drivers. The ones in yellow are the anthropogenic ones. Disease can just arise, it's part of the normal natural cycle, but those top 5, that's what we're doing.

And I like to consider the flow of diseases and parasites. Ecology is a lot of studying of resources. The ecologists refer to communities having resources.

Simple thing, yes, we exploit resources like a coal mine. Well, so does a plant, it was exploits the water, it exploits the light. And similarly, diseases can have flows.

Now it gets a bit confusing because ecologists talk in terms of micro and macro parasites, which is odd for a vet, because to me, a parasite is one of those big things that you can see, whereas the micro parasites, there are microorganisms. But I've come round more to the ecologist way of thinking, because pretty well all of our disease organisms are parasites. And understanding them and what happens, that's the key to controlling outbreaks.

And there's this concept of ecological epidemiology, where you look at what's driving the epidemiology based on things like agent, vector, and environment. Bluetongue in 2006 was a good example, a new agents, Bluetongue 8, the vector, which is the midge, which wasn't previously carrying it, and then the environment, the blowing of the winds bringing it in from Europe into the UK. Most of us would agree that if we're controlling a parasites, be it micro, be it macro, we need to break the parasite cycle.

We've got to identify the hosts, take action against them, action against the parasites, and so on, all of those will be done. If we look at the hosts, one of the things that we do need to do is identify, in particular, the reservoir hosts. That's crucial for any disease.

TB being a, a great example, we'll come on to that later on. The definitions I've put up there, unfortunately are open to a lot of academic disagreement. But things like competent or incompetent host, does the virus stay within that particular host and go nowhere, or does it spread on?

Deer in foot and mouth, for instance, certainly got foot and mouth, they had the clinical signs of it, but they didn't pass it on. They were an incompetent host. Quick example, fleas.

We give Bravecto to attack the parasite. We'll use, Staykill in the house. I have to think for a minute which one that was.

We might even want to wash or burn the bedding. We can't do much about reducing the host parasite interaction though. Ray slightly different.

You would call the infected and obvious diseased animals. We vaccinate to control the parasite within the host. Because it's got no free living stages, we can't do anything about those two.

And we look at reducing waste because the reservoir host for rabies is more often than not the human dogs, the dogs living in the villages, rather than the animals themselves. So if we look at rabies in the Ethiopian wolf, quite a attractive little animal really. Threatened population know only lives in the Ethiopian highlands.

You can vaccinate the animal. You trap them to do it, and it's very, very effective. But given that the host is actually, the reservoir is the domestic dog, and if they're much more easily accessible, then what they've done is to go around the villages vaccinating all the dogs, and that then protects the wolf.

Slightly different example, squirrel pox. Well, we haven't got a vaccine. The pox in coming in from the grey is very much a cause of one of the declines of the red.

If you remove the grey, the red will survive quite nicely. Anybody up in the north of England will attest to that, and the kind of the, campaigns they've had to kill the grey squirrels, and there's a really good example on the island of Anglesey. Where they actually completely cleared the grey squirrel population and the reds have just absolutely bounced back, it's just been phenomenal to see what's happened.

So I'll whip through some of the specific examples that we've got. Starting with Lyme disease, I will bounce over TB because I'm sure you're absolutely fed up of it. The Sega antelope mass mortality is fascinating, and then onto fasciosis.

So lime, . Mid 70s, named after Mr. Bergdorfer.

And a horrible disease, really unpleasant arthritis, meningitis. Lots of chatter about chronic Lyme disease. Rubbish testing, it's very, very imprecise indeed.

And in the UK maybe 1000, 1500 cases, dogs, yes, they get it, but I've not been able to find any hard data at all, so they're really, really low. But this isn't a modern disease. Let's see, this is Utsy.

And Etsy was found here. On the border between Italy and Austria, up in the High Tyrrell, they thought he was a fallen climber at first until they did some carbon dating and found that he was over 5000 years old. But interestingly, PCR has found really a DNA.

So back to that slide, how do you control the parasites, identify the hosts, there are hundreds of them. So which of the reservoir hosts? In other words, the reservoir is where you get the disease circulating without any influx.

It's small rodents. In the States, it's this charming little animal. And in the UK we have this one.

Most of the other hosts are just spillover hosts. They're mostly incompetent ones, they get it but not do very much. And of course, as you all know, Lyme is transmitted by ticks and the.

The ticks pick it up as larvae by feeding on the mice because there's no transvirial transmission of the Borrelia bacteria. The adults, yes, they tend to feed on the larger prey, deer, sheep, humans. They are tick amplification hosts.

They do not play any part in the actual transmission of Borrelia. But they do amplify the tick population. So what happened in the eastern US where they've had an absolutely massive increase in it?

We have to go into ecology and we have to go into food webs. Go back to the early settlers, they cleared the woods, little house on the, in the big woods. And they shot all the wolves, pretty well exterminated them.

When the settlers moved west, the forest regrew, as did the deer population, because there was nothing there to eat them. There was an increase in ticks, there's been an increase in lime. Except it's a bit more subtle.

Because in the absence of the wolf, the coyote population increased because there was no, no threat to them. Coyotes are an intra-gilded competitor, they share the same sort of food resource, so they will kill foxes because they're a competitor for them. And that reduced the predation of the mice because the foxes were very good predators of the mice.

The mice, if you remember, were the reservoir. So the lime reservoir massively increased just at the point that the ticks massively increased. And then we had this aspect, the human behaviour.

People wanted to live in these semi-rural areas, they wanted to be around trees and nature. This is where we talk about the value of biodiversity, and this work in 200, 2001, finding that where there were fewer species, you had more Lyme cases. The hypothesis being that if the mice are the only species in these island woods, and they are islands, if you think about some of the little spinneys and places in East Anglia, surrounded by arable land, they're cut off from any other wood.

So they would be the only prey, if you like, for the ticks. The ticks can only bite the mice, nothing else. They're a competent host.

If you've got more species, particularly the incompetent ones, there's less chance of each individual tick becoming infected. And this is being referred to as the dilution effect hypothesis. It works when there's one competent host, but isn't so great when you've got more of them.

And there certainly has been contesting of the, of the hypothesis. But on the whole. Dilution hypothesis is generally accepted that the richer your species, the less likely you've got for a disease to emerge, and if you just think about what's happening at the minute with coronavirus and where that's come from, that's part of it.

What about the UK? Well, we've got 3 competent hosts. We've got a rising deer population and lots of sheep, and lots of ticks, and a lot of people wanting to be in the outdoors.

It'll be interesting to see if Lyme disease drops this year because of fewer people being out and about. And here's one, this is a, a bit of a blindside move of my own. If we introduce the lynx, they will eat the foxes, so will we see the same situation that the fox population will drop and there'll be more mice and we'll get more lime.

Don't know. Con conservation medicine is often about asking questions rather than giving answers. This presentation was originally done in 2018, and I wrote then that there was a risk of tick-borne encephalitis, a very common virus in Eastern Europe.

That's now been shown to exist in the UK. It's very similar to Lao Pingle. So we've got another problem.

It's very, very complicated, multi-host, multi vector. TB, I'm gonna skip through this one really quite quickly, because a lot of it then you will know, but there may be some bits sticking in there. The Mycobacterium complex, huge number of species and and subspecies.

Huge problem in the UK in the late early 1800s, early 190s, with the city dairies, the slums, the poor, poor nutrition, TB testing introduced, nearly gets rid of it. Small pocket in Gloucester, and you know the rest. Interesting to speculate where TB's come from, however.

Most people will think it's becoming when we domesticated cattle from the aurochs and buffalo. But actually, if you look at the phylogeny of the organism, there is a question that it's come from early hominids. Certainly, tuberculosis crops up in the great apes.

So it may well be that M. Bovis has gone from early hominids, early humans, into cattle. Into badges, back into people.

As a disease, it's an existing or re-emerging disease. It's one of the biggest problems for the World Health organisation prior to COVID. Big conservation issue takes out some affected species like lions in Serengeti.

But most of the problems are the wildlife livestock interface that we experience in the UK. And again, all of these reservoirs that exist are the places where they've had big problems with with TB and wildlife and livestock. Back to that slide, how do we control it, how do we control that parasite?

You've been through some of this, I'm sure I don't really need to go spend too much time on that slide. Keeping cattle and badgers apart is difficult. We've got a grazer and a specialised worm predator, so they share the same environment, real problem.

And we can't identify which animals are infected, so it's a problem for removing them. Badger ecology is fascinating. I'd recommend the book called Badger, the Naturalist series by Tim Roper, really interesting read.

They live in a group, but they have no cooperation. Completely different to almost any other animal that lives in a group, so they don't cooperate for feeding, for reproduction, or for rearing of the young. There's a single, maybe 2, reproducing females in a set, and they mark the sets.

And when the young female males get to sexual immaturity, they're either kicked out or they move to a new empty set, and that's the biggest driver for the perturbation that we see. For the controls, the culling, yes, we'll talk about that, but this is the interesting one to maybe think about doing the injectable contraception, the contraceptive vaccine. Zippolyer is probably the best one.

The reason being that if you were to use a GNRH vaccine in something like a badger, you would affect how its reproductive cycle works and how it's estus works, and it probably wouldn't be showing overt stress, therefore not scent marking. And some of the work that Timothy Rope has done would show that it's the scent marking that defines the areas. So if we were to use the GNRH vaccine, it might actually increase motivation, bizarrely.

Cattle controls, let's just skip that one. The social science is a huge part of conservation medicine. I'm gonna talk a little bit about COVID-19 a little bit later on where social science is needed and there's resistance of a population to change.

We've got the same problems in the UK with TB. Sega, those of you who've got small children or just like watching Ice Age cartoon anyway will recognise this animal, this rather bizarre double nose. They very much are remnants of the last ice age.

A critically endangered animal with mass mortalities, and this was the thing that happened in 2015, 200,000 animals dying in nine weeks. They live here in this really restricted area. And they are under threat.

And this picture here, this is what mass mortality looks like. This is a flat plain, you can see there are animals just, they have just dropped dead. They do gather in these big congregations to carve very, very quickly in one go, and they just simply died.

And because this had happened mid 2015, the concepts of one health conservation medicine were already thought of, big team assembled. Paul Duff, one of the vets up at the VLA in Penrith, was part of it, gave a great presentation to us. And they did the p.m., they found the haemorrhages, they did the bacter neurology, and then this is what they called pasturella.

Many species have it, many species have it as a commensal, but what was triggering that commensal to become pathogenic? So again, multi-team approach, looking at so many variables, looking at the geography, looking at the geology, looking at the rainfall, looking at the vegetation, looking at the humidity. And the one correlation they got was a strong correlation of relative humidity to death.

Weak association of temperature, but the humidity was a thing that seemed to be associated with it. Now the interesting thing is there's no folk records of mass die-offs and there's nothing in the pre-Soviet literature. So it would seem this is a consequence of modern climate change.

It's just getting too warm for an ice age animal. So on to fluke. My little favourite topic at the moment.

We all know a fair chunk about it, but it is a good conservation project. There they are, little horror, and that's what they do. This is actually a roe deer liver rather than a sheep one, but you can see it's pretty well mashed.

And it's on the up, we know that. Why? Andytic resistance, climate change, and then the dreaded green blob and land use.

And if you're not a climate change believer, this is the straightforward fact. In the early 1900s, the average temperature was about 8.5.

Now we're about 9.5. And 9.5 degrees is a critical temperature for fluke and snail development.

This was the view from my bedroom window on the 6th of December just after Storm Desmond. Fairly catastrophic flooding. And whatever that's happening, whatever the reason for climate change, there's no doubt the parasites are evolving quicker than we are.

This paper by Fox and others, really well worth a read, concluding that there could be parts of the UK where it will be totally unusable for livestock because of fluke. These two pictures were taken from a document that did their owns after Storm Desmond, suggesting that farmers could be using their land as a sponge to prevent downstream flooding. Well, I think they are just snail havens.

The green blob. Now we go back to Long Sleddle. And the white claw crayfish.

And this was the point that I started to really get interested in, because this graph here is typically what a vet does. We just treat at an appropriate point. We use the Osure forecast although there's another new model coming in, which looks really good.

I think Diana Williams has been part of that one. But essentially we are just simply treating the stock. We're treating the parasite within the definitive host.

It's just not working. So I started to look at it in a different way, because the snails also undergo pathological change. So it's a disease of two different different species.

The snails, they get bigger because they effectively get castrated and resources get diverted. So I think we've got to look at flu as very much an environmental and landscape disease. So back to this control of parasite slide, and there are your hosts.

Well, obviously we don't want to control the sheep and cattle because they're the produce, debatable whether you want to do anything with the horses. Those three, yes, you can do something to control them, but they are fairly ubiquitous. They're always going to be around.

The drugs aren't working within the parasite, within the hosts, and vaccines are a long, long way off. You could take some action against the snails. They used to use copper sulphate, now banned because of knock-on effects.

Birds. Jenny Hol did a great little letter in the vet record a couple of years ago about the impact of when the ducks were kept in because of avian influenza. Suddenly, the sheep were showing signs of fluke in the livers.

And then the following year, when the fox arrived, they had exactly the same problem. The French have got clever with carnivorous snails, combining that with copper chloride in the watercress beds, and they've reduced the numbers of snails quite successfully. But only about 10% of snails are infected with the fluke.

So even halving the population isn't going to make that much of a difference. You can try and get cute and give the snails Prasaquanel to kill off the reedy within the snails. And then this is the stuff that we already do.

We drain the land, we fence the bogs, but they are labour intensive. The drains get blocked, as I said to you about the long saddle issue. And in really wet years, the snail populations can expand out from those boggy areas.

You could attack that environment. They did this forssy flies. The trouble is they took out just about everything else as well, so it's got to be balanced up with the other environmental factors.

Is it ethical? If you're stinking multidisciplinary terms. The mammal's gotta meet that snail in some way, and the snail's gotta meet the mammal.

We know that Galba's got preferred sites, so the mammal faeces has got to be in that snail habitat. Equally, the ciraria has got to get onto attractive vegetation so that it's eaten and the cycle is completed. Can we target those sites?

And if we can, what are the crucial factors in those reservoirs, which will help us to get towards some form of control? Well, the snail habitat is recently disturbed mud. They like it.

That's where the algae grow that they feed on. It's an area that's no biodiversity. There's no competitors, there's no predators, it's perfect for them.

Common factors, I mentioned the temperature, the moisture. Galba needs slightly damp soil. Fasceola needs a water film.

Anything else, they have huge variations, they can cope with these rapidly changing water bodies. So the question is what drives soil moisture, we can't do anything about temperature, but what drives moisture? That's a PhD almost, it's a whole university topic, but these are the things that you need to know, field capacity.

That's when the macro pores of the soil are empty, so it's just a damp soil. If it's saturated, those macro pores are full and the soil can't take any more. Waterlogged is saturated long enough that the chemistry of the soil changes, and that's important because it changes and actually affects the drainage, it stops the draining happening.

The other thing that will affect soil moisture is trees and vegetation. Interception is where wind will blow the rain that's sitting on the branches and on the leaves, blow it off, it can reduce the water that hits the ground by about 50-60%. Roots make soil more permeable, and the trees obviously transpire water up from the soil, and we've seen that in the last few months, it's only a few weeks trying to water your garden.

And everyone will be aware, woodland is drier than pasture. Soil is more stable, there's less light, there's also actually fewer algae that been tests comparing it. Now, I would just question, I've go back into this thing about is it, is it ethical to change an ecosystem?

Now I'm no fan of Mr. Mombit because he doesn't like sheep on Lake and fells, but I would wonder if by improving pasture, if we've given the snails an absolute head start. There's more compaction, there's more disturbed mud, because our tractors are bigger, our cows are bigger.

That mud supports the algae, and we then put fertilisers, be it NPK or manure, which is the eutrophication, this algal bloom you'll sometimes get in waterways because of fertiliser runoff. And then we lime it. We have created an ideal snail habitat, but here's the key thing, it is just for the snails.

Because these compaction pressures keep going. There's nothing, there's no ecological succession that comes in, there's no growth of other plants, there's no other animals that come in. And this is the sort of typical picture you get.

That's a field that's behind my house. And we've got this sort of sharp delineation here of the mud where the farmer was moving the tractor around in late October, November to move some signage bales, and that remained like that through the early part of the spring. And the moles didn't go there, just too compact, no worms.

So what can we do? Well, if the soil is more stable and drains better, it won't form as much mud. That means less algae, less food for the snails.

The food is critical. The more the snail eats, the more scaria it will produce. That's data going back to the 1950s.

If you've got more vegetation, more shade, that restricts the algae. And if we keep the soil slightly drier. The free living stages can't move around.

How do we do it? You need to identify those reservoir sites and there's certainly quite a few ways of doing that. We could plant it up, trees, shrubs, flowers, and you'd be using these particular species, Alder in particular is very good at growing in wet conditions, so is willow.

Maybe even something like Bog Myrtle. This, this is the stage I'm now at in my investigations of looking at what plants might be useful. But I'm fully aware you've got these little blighters to deal with.

We want to try and avoid too much so. If we increase the biodiversity, that's great, encourage the waders, encourage the ducks to actually eat the snails. But again, a downside.

More ticks, more head fly. And I'm realising I'm sort of almost contradicting myself about biodiversity, that we're improving the biodiversity and yet we're actually increasing the number of parasites. There's a balance to be had in all of these things.

So to illustrate what I'm talking about, this picture was taken in early to mid-May, a few years ago. And this beech tree here. On a tree, the edge of the canopy usually goes to the edge of where the roots are.

So you've got some reasonable grass underneath the tree, and then as soon as the canopy stops, you've got this really rushy boggy area. And if you, oops, That was just too exciting. If you look through that area, you can see again.

There's grass round here, but we've got some rushes, it's brown. Over this area. And we've got rushes around the tree, which would tend to go against my hypothesis.

I hope it's coming through on your screen, but this, this tree is actually dead, you can see the cracks in the bark. So there'll be very little in the way of active transpiration going on here. There wouldn't be any of the mycorrhizal fungi which improves drainage, and therefore you've got the soggier area.

I accept it's not proof, but it's just interesting to look at. So I said I'd move on from the particular animal side of things to looking into how SARS COVID-19 fits into this concept of ecosystem health and and conservation medicine. And we'll be fairly familiar with that timeline.

Just to reiterate, the virus is SARS COVID-2 and the disease is COVID-19, although COVID-19 is being used to, to cover just about everything. The origins are fascinating, and I would point you towards the RCVS Knowledge Webinar. There is some great stuff on RCVS Knowledge and the webinar introduced by Pam Mossdale with Tim Nuttall, really, really good.

The coronavirus is the same as the SARS outbreak that we had in about 2005 and the Middle East respiratory syndrome that we had. SARS through civets from bats, MERS through camels and other dromedaries from bats. And the virology that they've done looks at the binding sites of how the virus will bind onto the cells, and that's the particular receptor that they go for.

And the work that they've done, there's been a 76% similarity to the original SARS, but actually something like a 96% to 1 of the back coronaviruses, that, that's a pretty big similarity. The virus has got a very high binding efficiency to the human ACE2 receptor, but it's also quite high for bats, carrots, and ferrets. You may have heard that there's been a mink farm in the Netherlands just sort of semi-closed down or sort of, isolated because of, isolation, SARS-COVID-2 in the, in the mink, which are muscular just like the ferrets.

But you've also got this funny little one, this polybasic cleavage site. I'm not a virologist, so I'm not gonna go into this at all because I don't fully understand it. But they haven't really found anything in a wild host at the moment that sticks into that, that, that they can say this is definitely where it's come from.

So there's two thoughts. Either it's direct animal into human. Possibly via the pangolin, the two papers that report pangolins, although it looks like it's right, these aren't peer-reviewed papers, so, there's still a question mark sitting over them.

But the key thing is that these altered binding sites, these new binding sites that have evolved, they need high populations to do it. And then you get the bats in thousands in their roosts, and pangolins, unfortunately are farmed in China for their scales for medicine. So that's one option.

The other one is that it's originally come from the bat, but then it's been circulating and evolving in humans since about mid November, and there's certainly some evidence that there may well have been circulating virus and they're gonna be going back and doing samples and checking. How do we stop it happening? I don't want to be too unfair to the Guardian, I do read it, but this is what you're reading all the time.

Close the wet market, stop deforestation, don't eat meat and dairy. It isn't as simple as that, but this is what the wet markets are like. So you've got live animals and dead animals, and, again, if your screen is picking them up, just look at the bruising on these animals from the slaughter process.

I know these things are gonna have darker meat than our standard UK chickens, but, that to me looks like a good old bruise. And then you've got those, goodness knows what that meat is there. But again, you've got the chicken with their heads on.

But before we get too sniffy about this, it's worth remembering that you can buy chickens, roosters in France with their head still on. One of the problems we have is that something like 70% of the emerging human diseases have an animal origin. That's a paper from about 2001, Taylor, I think.

And interestingly, bats and rodents and also our livestock species are overrepresented with the number of viruses that they have. Bats and rodents in particular have the potential for the zoonotic ones. And these viruses, the microparasites, are moving all the time.

They're moving freely between the species, but there's usually too few to establish a proper population that can then evolve into something new. Now, I've just thrown in a brackets about invasive non-native species, which, if you remember an earlier slide is one of the drivers of biodiversity loss. And for a species to become an invasive non-native, it's got to arrive in significant number.

And find a niche to be able to exploit, like the grey squirrel. Just one or two arriving, say as birds would migrate if they get blown in by a storm, isn't going to be an invasion. So I'm just, there's a little bit of a parallel between the two things there.

But you do need some significant factors before you get the human to human transmission. And then the big question that is. Being asked is why, why bats, what is it about bats, they have more viruses than any other mammal group.

They're quite long lived animals for a tiny little thing. I mean, so OK, some of the fruit bats are fairly chunky, but a lot of bats are quite small. They live in really dense populations, they've got a high metabolic rate, you would think they'd be short-lived.

They're also very long evolved, sort of from the Eocene, from the time when mammals were just getting going. So perhaps part of it is because they've had time to adjust. And then there is this fascinating thing that bats actually have a lower inflammatory response to viral infections.

They still have the same virus load, but they're just not kicking out the same inflammatory response, and if you think particularly how. SARS is affecting people when they've got COVID, that some of the people who've died have died from this, this cytokine storm having this massive inflammatory response. Those of you who do a little bit of small animal will remember that the coronavirus in cats, or FIP, it's actually the inflammatory response that is the problem of the pathology and not the virus itself.

And the other thing with bats is that a lot of the species have what's called sympatric overlap. They all exist, and lots of different species in the same area. There isn't too much competition between them, so they can share the viruses between members of the species.

And funny if rodents do the same thing. You get rats and you get mice all occurring roughly in the same area, lots of species of of of mice. And the risk of a zoonosis increases with greater human contact.

That goes without saying, again, more opportunity for a virus to move into a different, different host. So The way that one health and ecosystem health would then fit into what's happening, go back to that early slide, ecological epidemiology, consider the host, their agent, the environment, asking the questions, why has this emerged? Well, yes, those factors I've got there, the deforestation.

It's pushed bats closer to humans. They come and raid the farms. Nifah virus, a really weird one, the bats came in to the pig farms, because the pig farmers to keep the pigs sheltered, had planted mango trees.

So the fruit bats came, ate the fruit, peed on the pigs. The pigs got the virus, passed it back to humans, and also the bat, the bats would pee into . The containers for palm juice, so never drink fermented palm juice if you go into Southeast Asia, really nasty disease.

The expanding farms created closer contact, and the hygiene isn't good. What happens to all that shit? But you've got to ask a bigger question, you've got to ask why.

Cause people need food, people need medicines. And this is where the social science of conservation meds comes in. The wet markets, I said, we may be condemning them with our clean Western ideals, but most towns will have a shambles.

There's a shambles within Kendall, there's one in York. The shambles is where the animals came to be slaughtered. That's where all the butchers were, and the blood and the the shit ran down the streets.

That's not that long ago. We've changed our culture, so these other cultures need to think about changing this concept of eating a freshly dead animal. And I need to speak to people who know these markets better, but I understand that the reason they want the freshly dead one is that they can be certain that that hasn't been sitting in the sun for 2 days before they get to eat it.

So there's a whole big culture change needed. There's a need to provide clean, high quality protein to these populations, so they don't go eating the bush meat, cos that's the other aspect. And some of this is compatible with reducing the amount of damage to the ecosystem, getting the farming right.

They need better medicine. They need to move away from the pangolin scale medicine, because that's one of the other sources. But that's hard to do when those populations haven't got the same access to medicine that we have, and it's very easy for us in our comfortable warm surroundings to be able to say you must do this.

We've got to take our role in it as well. We've got to reduce our consumption of fast foods and palm oil products, both of which are driving the deforestation. No doubt about that.

I think we've got a good resource in the UK that we can provide for this. We've got experts in one health conservation medicine, and we've got some great experts I'm talking to you at the moment for intensive farming. We've got to tackle disease like African swine fever.

How much impact has the the death of all those pigs in Southeast Asia had on people going towards bush meat because they can't get the pork and therefore increasing the risk of infections coming in. We've got to start doing better surveillance in these virus hotspots, it has been going on. It sadly has been ignored.

These virus outbreaks have been widely predicted for at least the last 1015 years. And then vaccine banks, there was one being developed for the original SARS, but was stopped when the vaccine, when the virus just fizzled out. And that was a mistake because that work should have carried on to get these core component vaccines.

I said, who would want to use conservation medicine, ecosystem health right at the beginning of this presentation. Obviously anybody doing conservation and wildlife would need it. But that's more than just looking after exotic, this is population health.

So this is where livestock vets like yourselves can use some of these concepts to look at parasite control or those wildlife reservoirs. Companion animal vets, less so, but equally parasites and imported diseases. And governments, zoonotic control and welfare of wildlife, the new agriculture bill, the public good of of wildlife, unfortunately, the push towards rewilding, they've got to be really thinking about these concepts.

If they create a wild wood, what diseases are they going to create by doing so? So in summary, it's greater than the sum of its parts. It's to me, a flow of diseases through the ecosystem, and there are lots of projects.

Biodiversity is important, not just because we've got lots of animals that we can look at and we like looking at, but because that has disease impacts. It is a multidisciplinary approach, it's a big picture approach. Thank you for listening.

Thank you very much, Ian. That was absolutely fascinating. You've covered so much and just opened our eyes to so much about veterinary ecology.

I'm sure we've already had, messages coming in through Twitter, saying how much people are, are enjoying, listening to it. So thank you very much. And we have got some time for questions, so I would, ask everybody who's got questions.

I, I've got loads for you in already, that you put them into the Q&A box, at the bottom. Could I also ask everybody that's watching just to spare 30 seconds to complete the feedback survey that should have popped up in your, in a new tab in your browser. Depending on which device you're using to watch the webinar, the survey doesn't, always present itself.

So if that's the case for you, you can just email us any feedback into the office at Webinar vet, so office atheebinar vet.com. If you're listening to the recording of this webinar, you can also add comments, on the website underneath the recording or email webinar vet office.

So, over to our, our first question. In the in which paradigm multidisciplinary approach would you put the evidence-based links between contact with green space, biodiversity and mental well-being, if not one health? And does it matter, if necessary, collaborative working results either way?

Do you want to repeat that one? That's quite a long one. Sorry, I didn't give you much, much notice.

In which paradigm multidisciplinary approach would you put the evidence-based links between contact with green space biodiversity and mental wellbeing if not in one house? Oh, I see, right, does it matter? No, it doesn't.

It's, I did say it was a personal view. It's. I just feel it's, it's slightly.

It's probably, I think it's got too much about it and the important things of one health of the approach to diseases. Improving public health, has been lost. I think there's just too, too much of the, it's good to be out in the green.

I think it'll change, and I quite agree, where would you put it, I don't know. To me it isn't one health, but no, does it matter, collaborative working? No, it probably doesn't.

As long as you don't sort of major too much on that and forget about the ecological aspects of how the parasites are moving between the different hosts. OK, brilliant, thank you. And another question here from David.

Obviously we're seeing an overhaul, in terms of agricultural support schemes. There's more of a focus now on environment. And David asks, have you got any thoughts on how, the new agricultural support schemes could or should impact ecosystems?

So the environmental land management schemes. Oh, thank you for that. I was just thinking what the hell is an ELM?

I just had to Google it. Yeah. My, my computer had shut down so I couldn't do that.

. It's, I mean that, I touched on it, and it's a whole thing in itself. It could be a whole presentation in itself. It does worry me slightly that some of the.

The, the push to make it more . I don't want to use the word environmentally friendly, but let, let's go for the forestation. Some of the, the ideas that we need to be creating more woods is, is great, it'll look nice, but I worry about the impact that will have on things like Lyme disease, and it's knock on on people, and then the transmissible, not transmissible, tick-borne encephalitis.

The support schemes themselves, I don't know enough about . To be commenting, David, that's a killer of a question, you bugger, he would do that, wouldn't he? That's a good question, I need to go away and look that one up and see exactly what the sport schemes is are before you come back.

So I think certainly, certainly within Wales, the schemes are very much focused on environmental targets and outputs and benefits and are really coming away from, from food production. And I think there is this danger that actually farmers could be pushed into being more environmentalists rather than food producers. And I suppose it's where do we, where do we strike that balance between conservation and food production?

I think it's having more people asking the sort of questions David's asking involved in the decision making. I mean, the fluke is a good one, because the, the push towards creating wetlands is a big one. Interesting work they've been doing with the Morden, up in the Highlands, looking at these wader scrapes where they deliberately damaged the, the peat to create a soggy area, so that the, the curlew and the plover have somewhere to go.

And has that created an increase in fluke, and I believe, thankfully, no is the answer. But it needs to be thought about. The my big problem with all of these environmental schemes is nobody's asking the question, what is going to be the impact on diseases by doing this?

And I think just, just sort of following on from that, you will have sparked a lot of interest, I'm sure tonight, in ecology. So what advice would you have for those listening who want to get more involved in the ecological side, of veterinary, so they can incorporate it into their day to day advice and their day to day work. What routes are there for, for vets to, to, to get more involved?

Well, we could always start a stream at BCVA. I can then give a couple of lecturers who'd be happy to come along and waffle, . I say my my route was the Edinburgh course.

There is a similar one at London. Edinburgh also do one on one health, transboundary disease, and I think one on livestock, wildlife diseases. And because they're modular masters, you can just do the one year if you wanted to, you don't have to do the full masters.

The downside is, it wasn't cheap. It was 6000 pounds a year. That, that's quite a, quite a wadge.

There's a lot of information, however, online, and if you've got access to any of the university libraries, and as we're saying, the, there is this thing of, I think Wiley are doing free downloads of PDFs of books. So that book that I mentioned, the Conservation one by Aguilera, is a great start to all of this. .

Yeah, and Vets sustain, this is something that I think they could be doing and again I'd be more than happy to throw my hat in the ring to help improve that side of things. Fantastic. Well, if, if part of the feedback is tonight from everybody that you'd like to hear more from Ian and BCVA can help facilitate some of these discussions, and learning, that would be great.

Let let us know. Just moving away from that slightly into a comment, earlier on in your presentation regarding the microbiome, obviously, that's, receiving quite a lot of attention, whether it be gut microbiome, and feet, and in, in mastitis as well. What's, obviously, you've got your own opinion on it.

What, what, how can you expand on, on your opinion? What, what's drawn you to, to the conclusion that actually it's not as important as possibly being made out to be in the, in the research? Again, because the, most of the research that you, most of the opinion that you're seeing is, it's all about the, the human wellness stuff.

And you're not seeing, well I certainly I'm not seeing the real interesting hard signs. So I'm fascinated to hear that you say there's something there about mastitis. Do you mean the microbiome within the other?

Yeah, so the microbiome within the Yadder, and also there's microbiome on the, on the there's been some research there. But I suppose you're, we're possibly looking at it from, from different angles. It's, it's the swallowing a yako yoghurt to make yourself feel a better human being is the complete utter tosh.

And unfortunately, that's what most people are associating with, with microbiome as opposed to proper, . A proper ecosystem within the other. OK, we don't have anybody from Yakcult online you'll be relieved to know.

So another question, just about COVID-19, you did, you did touch on this during your presentation, but. Why, why do you think that we've seen an increase, in the viruses actually jumping species? Because obviously there has been the, there has been the opportunity for this to happen, but obviously it's happened increasingly in increasing years and you did touch on, on some of this.

But equally they seem to be appearing quite suddenly, but you mentioned SARS sort of disappeared overnight. Do you? Do you see that happening with COVID or do you see it this now becoming part of the norm that we are going to see more of these challenges in in the future becoming, you know, becoming more regular?

I think we are going to see more of them. Whether they are more happening or whether we're looking for them more, I don't know, there will be an element of that. But certainly, as I said, we're putting the, the pressures on the ecosystem so that the bat populations are quite happy living with these viruses in their system and exchanging them between the species.

But once you start pressuring an ecosystem. Then these things get an opportunity to move and transfer. And they're transferring all the time.

They're moving between species, but it takes a change in that virus, a bit of evolution that just, just happens when you've got an RNA virus, they just mutate. Some of the stuff I was reading just before this about the, the questions about how the particular mutation that has allowed for the binding site, that ACE2 receptor. That is huge affinity on humans.

That seems to be the really key thing, just one, you know, probably no more than about 6 or 7 base per changes, and we've got the bad luck to get a nasty virus that goes human to human to human to human. And that's, that's where it gets a problem, bouncing from one animal to one person, not an issue. Bouncing from one animal into several people isn't an issue, but it's when it bounces between.

Other people that that it then becomes a real, a real headache. Perhaps COVID-19, we're lucky it's only got a 1% mortality in the general population and small if you've not got a comorbidity. My wife has, like, she's moved on from oncology, she's medical director in the local hospital and pretty well all of their deaths have been with comorbidities.

So we ought to be perhaps grateful that it's a, a low morbidity virus, although it's a bloody unpleasant one. People I've spoken to who've had it says it's really, really knocks you and you stay knocked for a while. I mean, Johnson was, was out for how many weeks, really unpleasant one.

And there will be others, I'm afraid, and this is why we do need to pay attention to the people who are doing the work in the field, doing the surveillance. And they're actively trying to look and see which is the next virus that's gonna come and hit us, and they need money, they need funding. Yeah.

OK. Another, another COVID question. It's a bit like the Daily Briefing, I'm afraid.

So why, why do they think that it came via a pangolin? Pangollin has come up a lot, but why, why specifically a pangolin? Is there anything in the, the makeup of the virus that suggests it, or?

There's similarity with coronas that are found in pangolins, that have, that, that share structure with the SARS COVID2, these binding sites that I talk about, they, they do occur in the pangolins, but they say unfortunately, the papers relating to it are, they're not peer reviewed, so they've not been through any proper scrutiny yet. It's just a, a useful question to be asking. The fact that it's popped up in the mink, as well as in the ferrets, maybe, you know, the, it was in a civet originally, that was a, a cat, and obviously not a muster lid.

But I have seen a comment from an American virologist saying we should be looking at raccoon dogs, which are bred as pets in Southeast Asia. And there is an awful lot of farming of these animals that provide the medicines that goes on. So the conditions they're kept in are really poor, and of course are ideal for exchange of viruses.

So it's just, yeah, there, there's just some work that says there's similarities between a pangolin corona, which, if it is, it could be good news for pangolins, because the poor buggers have been, imported and trafficked almost to extinction, so it'll be nice if they leave them alone. Yes, it, it would be, yes. So, that brings us to the end of our, our questions.

You'll be relieved to know, but I just want to say a huge thank you, Ian. That was an absolutely fascinating, presentation. We've got more comments coming through that people have really, really enjoyed this.

So thank you very much. But also, thank you, to everybody who's attended tonight. You'll see on our screen that we've got a pretty busy programme of webinars, over the next couple of months from BCVA.

If you're registered with webinar vets, or you're a BCVA member, you will get automatically, you will automatically be notified of these, for registration just a couple of days beforehand. And our next webinar will be in 2 weeks' time. So on Tuesday, the 12th of May 8 p.m.

Again, when we've got Rachel Hayton from Synergy Farm Health, who will be joining us to talk about on-farm culture. Is it a good idea in practise and how can we make it work? So we look forward to you joining us then, but in the meantime, I just want to thank you again, Ian.

Absolutely fascinating pleasure, brilliant. And, just to everybody, good night and take care.