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A Monitoring System for Transboundary Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) considering the Demographic Characteristics in Gairo, Tanzania
Get PDFA research article was submitted to Engineering, Technology & Applied Science Researchn Volume: 11 | Issue: 4 | August 2021Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) is present in many countries, including Tanzania. Gairo is among the districts that frequently face FMD. This study found that the current mechanism for communicating FMD in Gairo district suffers from a long chain of information flow that causes delay and insufficient information for FMD control. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the implementation of an information system named "Monitoring System for Transboundary Foot and Mouth Disease," developed purposely to provide a standard platform for communicating FMD between livestock keepers and other stakeholders in the district. The system enables timely sharing of FMD events such as outbreaks, precaution measures, clinical signs, and negative impacts using Short Message Services (SMS), Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), and Voice Calls (robo-calls) through the mobile phones. Also, livestock keepers may report FMD outbreaks direct to the system using feature phones. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyze data and Microsoft Visio was used for drawing the system architecture and information flow diagram. Finally, the system was implemented using PHP hypertext processor, JQuery, HTML, JSON, JavaScript, MySQL, and Apache webserver
Recent developments in Lablab purpureus genomics: A focus on drought stress tolerance and use of genomic resources to develop stress-resilient varieties
Get PDFThis research article published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2021Drought is a major climatic challenge that contributes significantly to the decline of food productivity. One of the strategies to overcome this challenge is the use of drought-tolerant crops with a wide range of benefits. Lablab is a leguminous crop that has been showing high promise to drought tolerance. It is reported to have higher drought resilience compared with the commonly cultivated legumes such as common beans and cowpeas. Because of its great genetic diversity, Lablab can withstand high temperature and low rainfall, unlike other related crops. On top of that, it is grown for multitudes of purposes including food, forages, conservation agriculture, and improved soil fertility. To enhance its production and benefits during the present effects of climate change, it is crucial to develop improved varieties that would overcome the challenge of drought stress. In the past years, there have been several reviews on Lablab based on origin, domestication, characterization, utilization, germplasm conservation, some cultivation constraints, and conventional breeding with limitations on the genomic exploitation of the crop for drought tolerance. Conventional breeding is the major breeding technique for many Lablab cultivars. The integration of genomic, physiological, biochemical, and molecular approaches would be required to develop drought-tolerant cultivars of Lablab. In this review, we discuss recent developments in Lablab genomics with a focus on drought stress tolerance and the use of genomic resources to develop stress-resilient varieties
Complementary feeding in Kongwa, Tanzania: Findings to inform a mycotoxin mitigation trial.
Get PDFThis research article published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021Complementary feeding of 6- to 24-month-old infants and young children with adequate, safe and developmentally appropriate food is essential to child health. Inappropriate complementary foods and feeding practices are linked to the high incidences of undernutrition among infant and young children in most developing countries, including Tanzania. Mycotoxin risk is an additional concern, given the documented presence of aflatoxin and fumonisin in food systems of Africa, especially maize and groundnut. In preparation for a trial of mycotoxin mitigation, we conducted focus group discussions and recipe trials to explore complementary foods and feeding practices in Kongwa, a rural district of central Tanzania. Sixty mothers of infants from 6 to 18 months of age in five villages across the district were purposefully sampled. During focus group discussions, mothers reported to mostly feed their children with cereal and groundnut-based foods as thin or thick porridges. The most common porridge preparations contained cereal (mostly, maize) ranging from 66.7% to 80.0% by weight and groundnuts from 7.7% to 33.3%. The ratio of cereal to groundnut ranged from 3:1 to 4:1. For the recipe trial sessions, mothers chose similar ingredients reported during discussions to prepare complementary foods. The reliance on maize and groundnuts in complementary foods predisposes the children to undernutrition and exposure to aflatoxins and fumonisins. These formative research results suggest multiple intervention points to improve complementary feeding and reduce mycotoxin exposure in this population, including education messages package on feeding practices, mycotoxin control practices and complementary food formulation
Food security mediates the decrease in women's depressive symptoms in a participatory nutrition-sensitive agroecology intervention in rural Tanzania.
Get PDFThis research article published by Cambridge University Press, 2021Objective:
To investigate if food security mediated the impact of a nutrition-sensitive agroecology intervention on women’s depressive symptoms.
Design:
We used annual longitudinal data (4 time points) from a cluster-randomized effectiveness trial of a participatory nutrition-sensitive agroecology intervention, the Singida Nutrition and Agroecology Project (SNAP-Tz). Structural equation modelling estimation of total, natural direct, and natural indirect effects was used to investigate food security’s role in the intervention’s impact on women’s risk of probable depression (CES-D > 17) across three years.
Setting:
Rural Singida, Tanzania.
Participants:
548 food insecure, married, smallholder women farmers with children < 1-year-old at baseline.
Results:
At baseline, one third of the women in each group had probable depression (Control: 32.0%, Intervention: 31.9%, p difference=0.97). The intervention lowered odds of probable depression by 43% (OR=0.57, 95% CI: 0.43-0.70). Differences in food insecurity explained approximately 10 percentage points of the effects of the intervention on odds of probable depression (OR = 0.90, 95% CI: 0.83-0.95).
Conclusions:
This is the first evidence of the strong, positive effect that lowering food insecurity has on reducing women’s depressive symptoms. Nutrition-sensitive agricultural interventions can have broader impacts than previously demonstrated, i.e., improvements in mental health, and changes in food security play an important causal role in this pathway. As such, these data suggest participatory nutrition-sensitive agroecology interventions have the potential to be an accessible method of improving women’s wellbeing in farming communities
Characterization of soil phosphate status, sorption and saturation in paddy wetlands in usangu basin-Tanzania.
Get PDFThis research article published by Elsevier Ltd, 2021Phosphorus (P) is a vital plant macronutrient required for plant growth which usually available in limited amount. P availability for plant uptake in highly weathered soil is controlled by soil erosion and high fixation. The availability of P applied from fertilizers depend on the soil pH, soil sorption capacity (PSC) and P saturation status (PSD), which determines P storage, losses, fixation, and additional P to be added with minimal loss to the environment. PSC and PSD are agro-environmental indicators used to estimate P availability and P loss to the environment. However, PSC and PSD of agricultural soils had been never studied in Tanzanian soils. This study was conducted to assess and estimate P availability, PSC and PSD and the risks of P losses in tropical soils from Usangu basin popular for paddy farming. In total, 198 soil samples from 10 paddy irrigation schemes were collected (November-December 2019) and analyzed for inherent P (P), metal oxides of Aluminium (Al ), iron (Fe ), and calcium (Ca ) as main PSC and PSD determinant. The determined concentrations were in range of; P 014.9-974.69 mg/kg, Al 234.56-3789.36 mg/kg, Fe 456.78-2980.23 mg/kg, and Ca 234.67-973.34 mg/kg. Estimated PSC ranged 5.62-34.85 mmol/kg with a mean value of 14.14 mmol/kg corresponding to high status, ensuring high P holding capacity for plant uptake. However, some soils had very low PSC creating a risk of P loss to environment. Among soils, the estimated PSD ranged from 0.01 to 17.57% and was below (<24%), indicating low P loss risks to surface and groundwater, however, some soils were observed to have PSD above 15% which correspond to a critical degree of phosphate saturation of 25% in a watershed using oxalate extraction method. Therefore some sites were associated with high P loss to the environment, immediate and precautionary actions for sustainable P management to increase productivity, environmental safety and sustainability are needed to be in place
Comparison of blue and green water fluxes for different land use classes in a semi-arid cultivated catchment using remote sensing
Get PDFThis research article published by Elsevier, 2021Study area
Kikuletwa catchment, Upper Pangani River Basin, Tanzania.
Study focus
This study compared yearly blue and green water fluxes using four different methods: Senay’s method (SN) (Senay et al., 2016), van Eekelen method (EK) (van Eekelen et al., 2015), the Budyko method (Simons et al., 2020) and the Soil Water Balance (SWB) model (FAO and IHE Delft, 2019). The yearly blue and green water fluxes of different Land Use Land Cover (LULC) classes were estimated using an ensemble of seven global remote sensing-based evapotranspiration products (Ensemble ET) and the CHIRPS rainfall dataset. The Ensemble ET was created from seven global RS-based surface energy balance models (GLEAM, CMRS-ET, SSEBop, ALEXI, SEBS, ETMonitor and MOD16).
New hydrological insights
Our study found that the EK method was able to map blue and green water fluxes with realistic results for irrigated and non-irrigation cultivated areas. Budyko and SWB gave too high blue water fluxes for the non-irrigated agricultural areas, whereas the Budyko and SWB models were not able to show a clear difference in blue-water fluxes in irrigated versus non-irrigated areas. On the other hand, the SN method estimated no blue water fluxes in more than half of the identified irrigated areas.
Three of the four methods estimate the highest blue water fluxes (318–582 mm/y) in forested areas, while the SWB model estimates the highest blue water fluxes in irrigated banana and coffee (278 mm/y). Overall, we conclude that the EK method yielded the most realistic spatial pattern of blue-water fluxes when compared to the irrigated land use map, whereas SWB could be considered after further calibration if higher temporal data resolution (e.g. monthly) is required
The Potential of Oyster Nuts (Telfairia pedata) for Environmental Conservation and Food Security in Tanzania: A Review
Get PDFThis research article published by Springer Nature, 2021The oyster nut, Telfairia pedata, a vine that grows on tall trees, is native only to Tanzania and Uganda. Its nuts are valued by the local population mainly because of their lactogenic properties. Despite its nutritional, economic, and environmental benefits and its low management demands, little is known about why this species has almost disappeared from local markets and farmlands. We selected 187 publications that described the current nutritional, environmental, and commercialization potential of Telfairia species as well as their socioeconomic importance, domestication, and utilization in East Africa. Most studies (60%) mentioned the nutritional and health benefits of Telfairia species, while 40% described their socioeconomic and environmental potentials. Almost half of the studies (47%) cited lack of alternative propagation methods to seeds, including cuttings, tissue culture, and grafting, as a constraint for oyster nut development. We conclude that studies on oyster nut production are rare despite its potential to contribute to food security, environmental conservation, and commercialization. The future of oyster nut production depends on the efforts by agriculturalists, conservationists, and nutritionists to conduct collaborative research and outreach programmes on this underutilized crop to diversify livelihoods of Tanzania’s smallholder farmers
TB or not TB? Definitive determination of species within the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex in unprocessed sputum from adults with presumed multidrug-resistant tuberculosis
Get PDFThis research article published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2021objectives Differences among Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTC) species may predict
drug resistance or treatment success. Thus, we optimised and deployed the genotype MTBC assay
(gMTBC) to identify MTC to the species level, and then performed comparative genotypic drugsusceptibility testing to anti-tuberculosis drugs from direct sputum of patients with presumed
multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) by the MTBDRplus/sl reference method.
methods Patients with positive Xpert MTB/RIF (Xpert) results were consented to provide earlymorning-sputum for testing by the gMTBC and the reference MTBDRplus/sl. Chi-square or Fisher’s
exact test compared proportions. Modified Poisson regression modelled detection of MTC by gMTBC.
results Among 73 patients, 53 (73%) were male and had a mean age of 43 (95% CI; 40–45)
years. In total, 34 (47%), 36 (49%) and 38 (55%) had positive gMTBC, culture and MTBDR
respectively. Forty patients (55%) had low quantity MTC by Xpert, including 31 (78%) with a
negative culture. gMTBC was more likely to be positive in patients with chest cavity 4.18 (1.31–
13.32, P = 0.016), high-quantity MTC by Xpert 3.03 (1.35–6.82, P = 0.007) and sputum smear
positivity 1.93 (1.19–3.14, P = 0.008). The accuracy of gMTBC in detecting MTC was 95% (95%
CI; 86–98; j = 0.89) compared to MTBDRplus/sl. All M. tuberculosis/canettii identified by gMTB
were susceptible to fluoroquinolone and aminoglycosides/capreomycin.
conclusions The concordance between the gMTBC assay and MTBDRplus/sl in detecting MTC
was high but lagged behind the yield of Xpert MTB/RIF. All M. tuberculosis/canettii were susceptible
to fluoroquinolones, a core drug in MDR-TB treatment regimens
MAGITS: A Mobile-based Information Sharing Framework for Integrating Intelligent Transport System in Agro-Goods e-Commerce in Developing Countries
Get PDFThis research article published by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications,Vol. 12, No. 6, 2021The technological advancement in Intelligent
Transport Systems and mobile phones enable massive
collaborating devices to collect, process, and share information to
support the sales and transportation of agricultural goods (agrogoods)
from farmer to market within the Agriculture Supply
Chain. Mobile devices, especially smartphones and intelligent
Point of Sale (PoS), provide multiple features such as Global
Positioning System (GPS) and accelerometer to complement
infrastructure requirements. Despite the opportunity, the
development and deployment of the innovative platforms
integrating Agro-goods transport services with e-commerce and
e-payment systems are still challenging in developing countries.
Some noted challenges include the high cost of infrastructure,
implementation complexities, technology, and policy issues.
Therefore, this paper proposes a framework for integrating ITS
services in agro-goods e-commerce, taking advantage of mobile
device functionalities and their massive usage in developing
countries. The framework components identified and discussed
are Stakeholders and roles, User Services, Mobile Operations,
Computing environment with Machine Learning support,
Service goals and Information view, and Enabling Factors. A
Design Science Research (DSR) method is applied to produce a
framework as an artifact using a six-step model. Also, a case
study of potato sales and transportation from the Njombe region
to Dar es Salaam city in Tanzania is presented. The framework
constructs the ability to improve information quality shared
among stakeholders; provide a cost-effective and efficient
approach for buying, selling, payment, and transportation of
Agriculture goods
Epidemiology, risk factors and diagnostic accuracy of surveillance methods of selected diseases presenting with respiratory signs in small ruminants in Tanzania
Get PDFA Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor
of Philosophy in Life Sciences of the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and
Technology Arusha, TanzaniaOutbreaks of diseases presenting with respiratory signs in small ruminants in Tanzania have
been reported for years. Concurrent infections complicate diagnosis resulting in untimely
interventions and significant economic losses. A cross-sectional survey was conducted
between June, 2016 and July, 2017 to determine the risk factors associated with small
ruminants exposure to Mycoplasma capricolum subsp. capripneumoniae (M.
capripneumoniae) and small ruminant morbillivirus (SRMV). Outbreak investigations were
conducted between June, 2016 and July, 2018 to validate the performance of the existing and
improved disease surveillance systems and to evaluate the accuracy of the reports, the data
were also used to determine the level of concurrent infections in those outbreaks. Risk factors
data were analysed using logistic regression models. The field data forms (FD-1 and FD-2)
performance were analysed using inter-rater reliability test against the gold standard test. The
percentage proportions were used to describe levels of concurrent infections. Risk factors for
M. capripneumoniae occurrence in goats were farming system (OR = 0.91073332), mixing
species (OR= 1.0793679) and grazing with wild animals (OR=1.0546803). Occurrence of
SRMV in goats was influenced by farming system (OR=1.154254), mixing of flocks
(OR=1.060278) and grazing with wild animals (OR=1.077164). Risk factors for occurrence
of M. capripneumoniae in sheep were farming system (OR=0.9310771) and presence of PPR
(OR=1.0564274) whereas, SRMV was influenced by farming system (OR=1.188681),
mixing flocks (OR=1.135146) and previous diseases outbreak (OR=1.161883). In outbreak
investigations, FD-2 performed better than FD-1 in the diagnosis of both CCPP (PPV =
22.2% Vs 16.2%) and PPR (PPV = 50.0% Vs 43.2%) in goats and in sheep, in the diagnosis
of PPR (PPV = 26.3% Vs 23.1%). In determining concurrent infections, 79.1% (117/148) of
the goats and 28.1% (16/57) of the sheep had concurrent infections. The SRMV and
Pasteurella multocida (P. multocida) in goats and SRMV in sheep were the pathogens
involved in co-infections. This study reports several risk factors being associated with
exposure of small ruminants to M. capripneumoniae and SRMV and that, the current disease
surveillance system does not provide reliable accurate data on outbreaks with co-infections in
which P. multocida are involved and should be considered in control strategies