Georgina Cherry

Georgina is an active participant in vHive projects including the African Livestock Productivity and Health Advancement (ALPHA) Initiative; a three-year partnership between vHive and Zoetis, co-funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Zoetis.

The ALPHA Initiative is working towards delivering sustainable enhancement of livestock health and production in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), namely through increasing availability of veterinary medicines, enhancing veterinary diagnostics and laboratory networks, and providing a platform for education, training, and information sharing in Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Nigeria.

She is working with the ALPHA research team to develop long-term data management processes for data storage and reuse.

Georgina is engaged in a new One Health research study to estimate the burden of human disease arising from zoonotic infections observable from routinely collected health data including GP records. The One Health paradigm recognises the interconnectivity of human, animal and environmental health. According to Public Health England (PHE), sixty percent of infectious diseases affecting people are zoonoses and yet these are relatively poorly studied, compared to non-communicable diseases.

This study uses data from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) which provides anonymised patient-level human health records collected during daily General Practice across the United Kingdom and linked to hospital encounters, death registration, and census-based deprivation and rurality data.

The study will describe secular trends in age-sex standardised incidence of thirty-five endemic zoonotic diseases and twenty exotic zoonoses notifiable to PHE, and phenotypic characteristics of those affected. It will also show acute and chronic sequelae to human health arising from zoonotic diseases diagnosed in routine medical practice. The findings will be suitable for informing government and other policy makers.

In addition to estimating the burden of human disease arising from zoonotic infections, Georgina is also working on a collaborative research study exploring the association between occupational exposure to food animals and antimicrobial treatment patterns, treatment failure and reported antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

AMR ranks among the greatest One Health challenges facing mankind. Antibiotic use in food animals is a contentious issue and people with occupational exposure to food animals are at risk of infection with resistant bacteria which can then be trabsmitted to community and hospital environments. Studies of AMR antibiotic treatment failure are comparatively rare and understanding rural-urban determinants of AMR and its transmission between animals, humans and the environment is central to the UK Government’s strategy to reduce AMR.

The study will be conducted using the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD), which provides anonymised patient-level human health records from daily UK General Practice and is linked to hospital encounters, death registration, census-based deprivation and rurality data. Agricultural and animal health workers and their co-habitants will be matched to non-agriculturally occupied controls based on alike-age, -gender, -GP practice and -infection type. The study findings will show the relative risk of ATF and AMR in those working in agricultural environments, and that of their other household members, adding evidence to the canon of research into antimicrobial resistance acquisition through contact with production animals.