Geography, Demography, and Livestock Systems in Uganda
Uganda is located on an East African plateau, 1100 m above sea level (Bakama 2010). As a land-locked country, it is geopolitically in the center of East Africa, a position that makes it vulnerable to the challenges of livestock and human disease management, and disease surveillance and control.
Being neighbors with the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan that have endured years of civil unrest means that it has to contend with the influx of refugees (Ford 2007; Hovil2007) and their disease-ridden livestock as they cross the increasingly porous international borders. This phenomenon is not limited to the borders with these
A. Muwonge (*)
The Roslin Institute, The Dick School of Veterinary Medicine, College of Medicine and
Veterinary Medicine, University of Edinburgh, Easter Bush, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: adrian.muwonge@roslin.ed.ac.uk
L. Nyakarahuka
Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, College of Veterinary Medicine, Animal
Resources & Biosecurity, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda
W. Ssengooba ∙ C. Kankya
Mycobacteriology Laboratory, Department of Medical Microbiology, Makerere University
College of Health Sciences, Kampala, Uganda
J. Oloya
Department of Epidemiology and BiostatisticsZPopulation Health, College of Public Health,
132 Coverdell Center, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
e-mail: joloya@uga.edu
F. Olea-Popelka
Department of Clinical Sciences and Mycobacteria Research Laboratories (MRL), College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA
e-mail: francisco.olea-popelka@colostate.edu
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 425
A. B. Dibaba et al. (eds.), Tuberculosis in Animals: An African Perspective, https:ZZdoi.orgZ10.1007/978-3-030-18690-6_22 two countries, as reports also indicate the presence of BTB in rustled cattle at the border between Kenya and Uganda (Ford 2007; Hovil 2007).
Uganda has a tropical, two-season climate, characterized by bimodal wet and dry seasons (Huxley 1965), and it has access to abundant sources of fresh water especially from Lake Victoria that is connected to the Mediterranean Sea by the Nile River.
The northeastern part of the country though tends to have prolonged annual dry spells. The moderate temperature, adequate precipitation, and fertile loam soils are what make Uganda the food basket of Africa (Huxley 1965; WFO 2012). These attributes not only ensured a steady growth in the agricultural sector, but they are also fueling a human and animal population explosion. The rapid human population growth (~3% annually; currently 37 million) in Uganda, combined with climatic and environmental changes, is increasing the extent of the human/livestock/wildlife interface. This rapid growth has, in turn, also greatly transformed the livestock farming systems in Uganda.Cattle, mostly reared in the Ugandan cattle corridor (UCC), are an important component of the county’s agricultural industry (WFO 2012: Oloya et al. 2007a). The UCC is a diagonal expanse of land spanning the country from its northeastern to its southwestern corners and supports about 45% (5 million) of all the cattle in Uganda (WFO 2012). Most of the large herds of cattle in the UCC are owned by pastoralist communities that keep cattle communally, thus increasing the risk of spreading zoonotic diseases like BTB between herds (Oloya et al. 2006, 2007a).
Subsistence farming is the predominant farming system in Uganda, and it is characterized by farmers keeping a few animals within the confines of a homestead, supplemented by crop cultivation (Ebanyat et al. 2010). This close association with their animals enhances transmission of diseases like BTB (Thoen et al. 2006) and increases the zoonotic risk in general when farmers rear animals infected with zoonotic diseases (Kankya et al. 2010).
22.2