Assessment of wildlife and livestock disease interactions in the Ngorongoro conservation area of Tanzania

The report states that whilst disease incidence varies with the ecological variety due to animal movements, virtually all livestock is at risk from all diseases present in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA).The investigations on wildlife / livestock disease interactions in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area revealed that some wildlife diseases and several livestock diseases constrain pastoralism and cause conflict between livestock production and conservation of natural resources. The lessons learned in the study include: several diseases pose serious constraints to livestock production in the NCA including East Coast fever, Ormilo, malignant catarrhal fever, contagious bovine pleuropneumonia, calf pneumonia, anaplasmosis, anthrax and blackquarter, but there is very little information, if any, on cause-specific morbidity and mortality data on nearly all the livestock and wildlife diseases in the NCAthe annual removal of livestock from the short grass plains during the wet season to the intermediate and highland areas in avoidance of exposure to MCF virus being secreted from 2-4 months old wildebeest calves exposes livestock to high risks of transmission of tick-borne and infectious diseasesalthough the disease risks are not evenly distributed in the NCA, the frequent migration of livestock in search of good pasture, water, salts, markets and in avoidance of specific diseases invariably leads to livestock being at risk of exposure to all the wildlife and livestock diseases The concentration of livestock and wildlife in the available pastures is a potential source of conflict between pastoralism and natural resource conservationto balance pastoralism and conservation of natural resources in the NCA there is a need to develop a sustainable livestock management program for the control of tick-borne and infectious diseases