Sistema de parada de emergencia (ESD) para la carga .1 Generalidades

As I elaborated on in Chapter Two, it is important that approaches that seek to minimise the risk of zoonoses in livestock-keeping populations such as the WaArusha do not frame risk as resulting from local people’s lack of awareness about these diseases. Critically, as this chapter shows, people’s involvement with livestock (along with the environment and other factors) shapes how they see risk and manage the potential for zoonotic disease. Dominant framings of risk, apart from obscuring the real causes of disease outbreaks such as poverty and its conditions (Wilkinson, 2013; Leach and Dry, 2010), do not adequately consider local people’s livelihoods, priorities, preferences, or concerns about their health and that of their livestock (Frankenberg, 1993). In Naiti, for example, herders conceptualised health in holistic ways which go beyond a sick cow or zoonoses and focus more on health as a form of well-being for humans and animals. But they were also concerned about the lack of resources necessary to sustain livestock, and they talked about their own precarious lives, in which health was one of many challenges. For example, one participant commented as follows:

You ask about livestock illness, yes, but what about water and land for grazing? Because when we have these, our animals are healthy, and we are healthy too. But the water we have here is dirty and we have to wash in it, water our livestock and share it with wildlife too. We do not have clean drinking water, or a functional cattle dip. Therefore, it does not matter that the cows give us illness through milk. Even if the milk is boiled, if the water

to wash the pot is dirty, people will still get sick from the water, but experts will say it is from the milk.56

Another added that:

Well, even if we boil the milk every single time before drinking, will this end all the sicknesses? I do not believe it will, because sickness will always be there. You just have to accept it and hope that it does not kill you.57

These remarks show that herders understand the risks associated with livestock and wildlife, as well as sanitation, food and the fact that in their living conditions disease occurrences in both people and livestock are inevitable, but that they have few options regarding how to prevent them. Indeed, they mobilised the meagre local resources, including the sharing of medicines to manage risks, in the best way they could. They also ensure that breeding occurs during times when grass is plentiful and diseases believed by locals to be prevalent during the dry season such as emboroto and oltikana ( explained in Table 4.2 below), are minimal, to ensure stock productivity and health.

However, different people managed these risks in different ways based upon their livelihood roles, as I discussed above. I look at the gendered knowledge of livestock sickness below.

Awareness of Livestock Illness and Risk

Animal illness was a frequent occurrence in Naiti, and lay knowledge regarding illness, its risks and how to manage it reflects patterns of human-animal interaction that I have discussed above. During key informant interviews and focus group discussions about animal health, participants talked in detail about illnesses they believed were common in their herds such as ormilo, reported by nearly all participants as common in small ruminants at the time of this study. Ormilo was used to describe a neurological syndrome with symptoms ranging from “dizziness to madness”,58 and was locally identifiable from the swelling of the head and “circling”59 in affected goats but the condition was reported to be less common in sheep and cattle. Although some authors such as Queenan et al. (2017) have attributed this syndrome to the neurological disease coenurosis, caused by Taenia multiceps, it is not clear whether this is the same illness that was described by

56 Interview, Naiti, 10 May 2017. 57 Interview, Naiti, 4 May 2017.

58 Interview, key informant, Naiti, 12 March 2017. 59 Ibid.

Naiti residents. In any case there is varying understandings of ormilo and its etiology. For example, some like Catalano et al. (2015) described this to be a syndrome common in short-horn zebu cattle in northern Tanzania, while others such as Hughes et al. (2019) have shown that ormilo is more common in small ruminants in similar settings in Tanzania. Indeed, this example illustrates the pitfalls of mapping local illness terminology to biomedically-defined diseases, something which I am particularly wary of.

Table 4.2 below illustrates WaArusha emic terms that are associated with common livestock illnesses. The associated clinical signs for these illnesses (as described in veterinary literature as well as the Naiti village animal health records) are listed in the left-hand column, while common local illness aetiologies are listed across the top of the matrix. For each local syndrome, the shaded cells indicate which of the illnesses’ clinical signs were reported by livestock keepers to be associated with the syndrome and/or were recorded in the village animal health records.

Table 4.2: Local illness aetiologies and their associated clinical symptoms obtained from the village animal health records.

Syndrome

Neuro- logical syndromes

Organ

failure Respiratory syndromes

Local disease name Common zoonotic clinical signs _orm il o N angi da /B rus ela s E m bor ot o/ engi ruw adh N dor obo ol ti kana ol oi robi in gaat i K ik ohoz i cha m bu zi Ocular discharge Nasal discharge Fever Circling in goats Coughing

Swelling of the head Skin lumps/swellings Rough fur

Sneezing Conjunctivitis Dyspnoea

Foot and Mouth lesions Diarrhoea

Abortion in cows Enlarged & discoloured offal

Death

Table adapted from Jones et al (2019).

Knowledge of common animal afflictions is differentiated based on the frequency and intensity of human-livestock interaction as shown earlier in Table 4.1. For example, men are more actively involved with larger livestock, especially cattle, than women and girls. Consequently, they mentioned local illnesses including emboroto (some Maa versions also use engiruwadh, other respondents called it ‘antirax’ for anthrax), which they said primarily affected cattle. This syndrome was mentioned in 96 per cent of all males sampled but only by 29 per cent of female participants. Some of the associated symptoms of this illness such as swellings on the skin, ocular and nasal discharge and sudden death

in affected cattle, correspond to the clinical signs of anthrax ( see Swai et al., 2010; Mubyazi et al., 2018; Hampson et al., 2011on clinical features of anthrax). The illness is known to cause immediate death in otherwise healthy-looking cattle, and human consumption of carcasses of infected animals is allowed only under the supervision of experienced male elders in the village. They examine the carcass and internal offal and believe that they understand procedures for the safe disposal of infected animal organs. Consequently, emboroto is perceived by nearly all male participants (and the women who mentioned it) as carrying the highest risk for both animal and human health. As I explain later in this chapter, this risk is associated with the unintentional consumption of infected meat, because a sick animal was expected to display visible symptoms such as bleeding from the ear and nose and swelling of body parts, and ultimately to die within a short period of time.

Further, men (both senior men and warriors) mentioned endorobo (Maa) ( see Table 4.2), an illness that was reported to be common in the highlands where livestock are transferred, presumably because these camps are often found where bushes are thick and which may provide habitat for tsetse flies, the main cause of this illness according to the respondents (This aetiology corresponds with clinical symptoms for trypanosmiasis, see for example Caudell et al., 2017; Catley et al., 2014; Turton, 1995).

In contrast, the vast majority of women sampled (98 per cent), mentioned small ruminant sickness such as ormilo (discussed earlier) as the most prevalent illness in the herd. The syndrome was common in small ruminants at the time of this study, and women often explained it to me in great detail, possibly because they mainly managed small stock that foraged closer to home. Ormilo was used to describe a neurological syndrome with symptoms ranging from “dizziness to madness”,60 and was locally identifiable from the swelling of the head and “circling”61 in affected goats.

Women also talked about nangida (Maa, see Table 4.2) in cows, which was explained as causing malaria-like symptoms in people but the symptoms in cows were less well understood, although a few respondents mentioned that the sickness caused fever and sometimes abortion in affected pregnant cows. As many indicated, women’s knowledge of this illness was due to their greater interaction with milking cows, referred to earlier,

60 Interview, key informant, Naiti, 12 March 2017. 61 Ibid.

and with healthcare centres (compared to men), from where they were informed about the illness’ zoonotic potential through consumption of milk, by clinicians. I explore this further in Chapter Five.

Gendered knowledge of zoonoses has implications for how risks of these diseases are understood and framed, and ultimately how they are managed by the affected population. To illustrate this, I now draw from four examples of risk perceptions, showing that they are influenced by how different people interact with livestock, the environment and the local economy.

Example One: Risk as Situated Within the Environment

As a group, warriors can spend up to six months in the highland regions, where livestock are grazed during the dry season between October and May. One warrior told me about the threats that his family and herd face:

When we trek with livestock across the plains into the highlands, we face many dangers to us and to our livestock because the bushes harbour wildlife… We know that highlands are a source of livestock sickness because of wildlife. We fear wildebeest because when cattle graze on the grass where wildebeest have been, they get ingaati [the locally identified symptoms correspond to some of the clinical symptoms of malignant catarrhal fever], which affects eyesight in cattle, and it is also fatal. Therefore, we ensure that we do not let our livestock graze in the fields close to where wildebeest inhabit. But this is not easy at times because land is not our own so even when we take the cattle further, we can run into trouble with farmers… this disease is not a danger to us but you know, if cattle get sick and die, then we are very affected, our food, our income, our psychology… so it is a risk to us.62

In this example, risk is framed as situated within the environment, in places where wildlife poses health risks for domestic stock, and as a coping strategy: herders avoid areas that are perceived to carry greater risks for wildlife zoonoses.

The warrior’s perspective frames risk in a way that is shaped by his everyday life and threats to it. He sees risk from a more holistic view of health, which links cattle health to human health, and which sees animal health as informed by more than pathogens, but in terms of food and medicine as well, and as being good for herders’ psychological well- being. It also points to the limits of controlling disease risk in a context in which issues

of land rights and ownership come into play, as in land not belonging to the herders. As Gabe (1995) also explains, this disillusionment can lead to diminishing trust in experts and authorities, due to what people may see as a lack of concern from government for the material constraints that produce health risks, such as dirty water or decreasing natural resources needed to sustain livestock in places like Naiti.

Example Two: Risk as Normal and as Something to Live With

Ndoye spends 84 hours a week in some form of contact with her 15 goats. Her husband, like several young men from the village, had left to search for work in Arusha. Ndoye accredited his decision to the dwindling prospect of livestock-keeping and crop production due to lack of or low rainfall. The family lost two cows to the 2016/2017 dry season, which she told me had died from starvation, and half of the goats had health complications ranging from ormilo to “coughing and fever”. I interviewed Ndoye about her perspectives on her goats’ health and the risk of her and her family catching these sicknesses. She perceived health risks as a normal and expected part of life in her village. Downplaying the risks that her sick goats posed to her health, she explained that:

I keep the sick ones in the family hut at night so that we [herself and her children] can monitor them throughout the night. I give medicine [antibiotic- tetracycline] through an injection to the goats, but if they die we eat the meat. … [I ask her if eating meat from a sick goat was a risk for human health.] It is not a risk because we live together with the goats. If it were to make us sick, we would have to be sick everyday… my work is to make sure ormilo does not enter all the goats, and that is why I separate those that are infected from the heathy.63

Similarly, other participants expressed that:

We have been drinking milk without cooking it since I was small, and I have never become sick because of it. I do not believe there is sickness in uncooked milk. You can see if an animal is too sick because it stops producing milk. We ask the women who milk if the cow is producing milk normally, and if it is then you have nothing to worry about the milk making you sick.64

We eat meat, we drink milk, our women cook with fat from animals, and we spread animal butter on our bodies and even drink fresh blood, but we do not

63 Interview, key informant, Naiti, 13 March 2017.

get any illness because of it. Animals are just like us, if they fall sick, you treat them, and they get better. Why should you stop eating animal products just because an animal is sick? Do you stop living with your brother if he falls sick?65

I do not think you can get ormilo from the goats or sheep, because I have never seen anyone circling like the goats do, and we always eat meat from these goats when they die, or we slaughter them for food when they catch ormilo.66

In these examples, locals see risk as normal, and illness as something to live with and manage where possible and hope that it does not get out of hand. Here, risk is not something external, but is to be expected, to be lived with and experienced.

These perceptions also show that risk is experienced collectively, and risk framings draw from what friends and kin have experienced, where knowledge sharing about what constitutes harm and what does not is key. Interestingly, from the first narrator’s personal experience of living with sick goats and not getting sick herself, this has shaped the way she sees risk and accepts it as normal and something to live with. She could do something about it, just like she knows to separate sick goats from healthy ones, because, apparently, she understands that the illness is transferable, but she does not mitigate against the risk to her and her family’s health. Perhaps it is also about what Frankenberg (1993) describes as the differences in priorities for community health, between what experts see as key and what local people themselves may perceive as important health priorities.

Example Three: Risk is Visible to an Expert’s Eye and Can Therefore be Mitigated Elder Lupeto is a respected healer who helps identify signs of common and more serious illness in people and livestock. I was invited to speak to him during an episode of suspected emboroto (clinical symptoms associated with anthrax) in the neighbourhood. A cow had been discovered by women during the morning milking to have lumps all over its skin, and after thorough examination by the herd owner, Lupeto was called in to help confirm the diagnosis. He explained to me that:

At first, I thought it was only lumpy skin sickness because the cow’s coat was rough and covered in tiny lumps. We call this sickness “lumpy skin sickness”… but the cow’s health deteriorated quickly and within hours it was

65 Focus group discussion with young male herders, Naiti, 4 May 2017. 66 Interview, key informant, Naiti, 17 July 2017.

dead… When I dissected the carcass and examined the liver and the kidney, I saw antirax [for anthrax] with my own eyes. It was right there. I asked the men to bury all the internal offal because these are the most dangerous to the people… if you eat them you die. The rest of the meat was cooked on high heat, and it was safe to eat because the sickness was on the liver and kidney.67 Other participants added that:

You can see antirax with your naked eye because of the colour of the liver and kidneys when you dissect the animal. If these organs are black in colour, the carcass should be buried, although some people eat the meat sometimes. The meat should be cooked thoroughly to kill the sickness, otherwise you can also die, just like the animal.68

You must never ever eat the offal or carcass where antirax is suspected as the cause of death. The older men will know this by looking at the colour of the offal. Whenever cattle die, we call a local elder because he is more knowledgeable to examine the carcass, and if it is [anthrax] then he recommends that all the offal be thrown away. I am a victim of this because I ate the kidneys of cattle that had died from this illness and I got really sick. I nearly died. As you can see these scars [the respondent had scarring on neck and hands] came from the antirax.69

We will eat the meat of a deceased animal unless we see with our naked eyes that the carcass has sickness on it, because it has changed colour, or the offal are inflamed, that is when we will agree not to consume it.70

In these examples, risk is visible to an expert’s eye and therefore there are things that people can do to mitigate against it. The fact that emboroto or antirax is visible to the naked eye makes the lay expert’s diagnosis final and his expertise appear well founded. The idea of visibility of the “sickness” as in this example raises important questions. Throughout my research, many people seemed to associate “risky” diseases with antirax. It was the model of risk, perhaps because, along with people reporting localised outbreaks in their herds, there had been two reported major outbreaks of anthrax within a period of ten years in Tanzania, one in 1997 and another in 2007 (see also Swai et al., 2010;