Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), or prion diseases, represent a unique form of infectious disease based on misfolding of a self-protein (PrP(C)) into a pathological, infectious conformation (PrP(Sc)). Prion diseases of food animals gained notoriety during the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) outbreak of the 1980s. In particular, disease transmission to humans, to the gene...

All farm animals will experience some level of stress during their lives. Stress reduces the fitness of an animal, which can be expressed through failure to achieve production performance standards, or through disease and death. Stress in farm animals can also have detrimental effects on the quality of food products. However, although a common assumption of a potential effect of stress on food ...

Antimicrobials are valuable therapeutics whose efficacy is seriously compromised by the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance. The provision of antibiotics to food animals encompasses a wide variety of nontherapeutic purposes that include growth promotion. The concern over resistance emergence and spread to people by nontherapeutic use of antimicrobials has led to conflicted practice...

A conservative projection shows the world's population growing by 32% (to 9.5 billion) by 2050 and 53% (to 11 billion) by 2100 compared with its current level of 7.2 billion. Because most arable land worldwide is already in use, and water and energy also are limiting, increased production of food will require a substantial increase in efficiency. In this article, we highlight the importance of ...

The study of ingestive behaviour has an extensive history, starting as early as 1918 when Wallace Craig, an animal behaviourist, coined the terms 'appetitive' and 'consummatory' for the two-part sequence of eating, drinking and sexual behaviours. Since then, most ingestive behaviour research has focused on the neuroendocrine control of food ingestion (consummatory behaviour). The quantity of fo...

Prions are an enigma amongst infectious disease agents as they lack a genome yet confer specific pathologies thought to be dictated mainly, if not solely, by the conformation of the disease form of the prion protein (PrP(Sc)). Prion diseases affect humans and animals, the latter including the food-producing ruminant species cattle, sheep, goats and deer. Importantly, it has been shown that the ...

The 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the United Kingdom was unprecedented, with the need to develop a vaccination policy at the height of the epidemic. The extent of consumer concerns about eating products derived from vaccinated animals was unknown as survey results were equivocal. A recent survey on avian influenza reveals that the European public are well informed about the disease...

Zoonoses are infections or diseases that can be transmitted between animals and humans through direct contact, close proximity or the environment. Clostridium difficile is ubiquitous in the environment, and the bacterium is able to colonise the intestinal tract of both animals and humans. Since domestic and food animals frequently test positive for toxigenic C. difficile, even without showing a...

Demand for animal protein for human consumption is rising globally at an unprecedented rate. Modern animal production practices are associated with regular use of antimicrobials, potentially increasing selection pressure on bacteria to become resistant. Despite the significant potential consequences for antimicrobial resistance, there has been no quantitative measurement of global antimicrobial...

One type of social behavior--agonistic behavior--is commonly observed among food animals. Agonistic behaviors are those behaviors which cause, threaten to cause or seek to reduce physical damage. Agonistic behavior is comprised of threats, aggression and submission. While any one of these divisions of agonistic behavior may be observed alone, they usually are found, in sequence, from the start ...