African sheep breeds could hold the key to helping farmers save money, Australian scientists say.
The African breeds are resistant to parasitic helminths or worms, to which Australian sheep are susceptible, said Dr. Gabrielle Persley, co-author of a paper on animal genetic resources presented this week at a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) conference in Interlaken, Switzerland.
Persley is a visiting research fellow at the University of Queensland and senior adviser to the director general at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Nairobi, Kenya. She said Australian sheep producers spend more than $200 million each year controlling helminths using monthly chemical drenches, a process that is not only expensive but also environmentally damaging. The drenches also are becoming increasingly ineffective because resistance to the chemicals is building up in the worms.
"The introduction of diseases resistance into Australian sheep based on the knowledge being gained from the study of the Red Maasai sheep in Kenya would be a boon both to the sheep industry and to the environment," Persley said.
Australia loses an estimated $226 million worth of livestock each year due to parasitic nematode worms, she said.
But in East Africa, the Red Maasai breed of sheep have been identified as resistant to nematode parasites, particularly the variety known as Haemonchus contortus (Barbers pole worm) which sucks blood and causes death if animals are not treated.
Persley said that using the genetic information from the Red Maasai sheep could produce huge savings for sheep farmers in tropical and sub-tropical areas, where the parasites were the main cause of production losses in animals. Researchers at the ILRI were now working on ways to identify the gene for nematode resistance in sheep, she said.
The Age-Australia
