The ‘Helminth Infections and Changing Climate: Tackling the Challenges for Animal Health’ research Call will be funded by nine funders from eight European countries and total available funding amounts to €5.65m, of which the Department of Agriculture Food and the Marine is committing €600,000.
Resistant helminth populations are found in all grazing livestock species, and resistance has developed for all major classes of anthelmintic drugs. Current estimates show that helminth infections cost the European livestock industry more than €1.8bn per year, with drug-resistance costing at least €38m per year in production losses and treatment costs.
The goal of the research call is to mitigate the spread of anthelmintic resistance in livestock through further investigation of its detection, as well as natural, and vaccine induced protection.
Speaking on the opening of the call, Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine with special responsibility for research and innovation, Martin Heydon, said: “Parasitic infections in livestock are damaging from an animal health perspective which has a knock on impact on overall farm profitability. That is why funding has been made available for successful Irish researchers to participate in this European research call and collaborate with their peers to find improved ways of dealing with these parasitic worms”.
The research call also includes scope for monitoring changes to the distribution of animal disease resulting from climate change, and modelling and forecasting the impacts of climate change on the spread of infectious livestock disease.