The surging demand for livestock products provides an opportunity to set poor farmers on pathways out of poverty by increasing production outputs and market access. At the same time it threatens the continued presence of smallholder farmers in increasingly demanding markets through livestock diseases and food safety hazards. While the presence of food safety hazards such as bacteria, parasites or drug residues in informally-marketed food is high, the risk to human health is mostly unknown and current food safety management is both ineffective and inequitable. Free-ranging pigs show a higher parasitic burden than confined pigs which results in output and subsequently income losses as well as increased risk to human health associated with pork consumption. The overall goal of the project is to improve the livelihoods of poor producers and consumers by reducing health risks due to parasitic diseases associated with pork consumption and to increase the livelihood benefits of the smallholder pig value chain through improved animal health in Uganda. The project aims to obtain baseline data on the parasitic burden in the pig value chain in selected sites in Uganda with particular emphasis on parasitic zoonoses and food-borne infections, to understand the epidemiology of prevalent parasitic diseases and to assess the risk to public health through pork consumption, and eventually to develop management strategies in order to reduce the parasitic burden in pigs and to reduce the risk to public health associated with pork consumption. A cross-sectional survey will combine a parasitological survey to obtain prevalence data with participatory methods such as questionnaires, interviews and focus group discussions to obtain data on husbandry, production and consumption practices in order to identify hazards, risks and risk factors.

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