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Uganda is a low-income country with the largest pig population in East Africa. Pig keeping has a large potential, commercially and as a tool for poverty reduction, but African swine fever (ASF) is a major hurdle for development of the sector. The objective of this study was to evaluate knowledge, attitudes and practices related to ASF in the smallholder pig production value chain in northern Uganda. The study included three separate series of participatory rural appraisals (PRA), comprising purposively selected farmers and other actors in the pig production value chain. In the PRAs, various participatory epidemiology tools were used. A total of 49 PRAs and 574 participants, representing 64 different villages, were included. The results indicate that participants were well aware of the clinical signs of ASF, routes for disease spread and measures for disease control. However, awareness of the control measures did not guarantee their implementation. A majority of middlemen and butchers acknowledged having sold live pigs, carcasses or pork they believed infected with ASF. Outbreaks of ASF had a strong negative impact on participants' socio-economic status with loss of revenue and reversal into more severe poverty. In conclusion, lack of knowledge is not what is driving the continuous circulation of ASF virus in this setting. To control ASF and reduce its impact, initiatives that stimulate changes in management are needed. Because the behaviour of all actors in the value chain is largely influenced by the deep rural poverty in the region, this needs to be combined with efforts to reduce rural poverty.

African swine fever (ASF) is a highly contagious, lethal and economically devastating haemorrhagic disease of domestic pigs. Insights into the dynamics and scale of virus transmission can be obtained from estimates of the basic reproduction number (R 0). We estimate R 0 for ASF virus in small holder, free-range pig production system in Gulu, Uganda. The estimation was based on data collected from outbreaks that affected 43 villages (out of the 289 villages with an overall pig population of 26,570) between April 2010 and November 2011. A total of 211 outbreaks met the criteria for inclusion in the study. Three methods were used, specifically; (i) GIS- based identification of the nearest infectious neighbour based on the Euclidean distance between outbreaks, (ii) epidemic doubling time, and (iii) a compartmental susceptible-infectious (SI) model. For implementation of the SI model, three approaches were used namely; curve fitting (CF), a linear regression model (LRM) and the SI/N proportion. The R 0 estimates from the nearest infectious neighbour and epidemic doubling time methods were 3.24 and 1.63 respectively. Estimates from the SI-based method were 1.58 for the CF approach, 1.90 for the LRM, and 1.77 for the SI/N proportion. Since all these values were above one, they predict the observed persistence of the virus in the population. We hypothesize that the observed variation in the estimates is a consequence of the data used. Higher resolution and temporally better defined data would likely reduce this variation. This is the first estimate of R0 for ASFV in a free range smallholder pig keeping system in sub-Saharan Africa and highlights the requirement for more efficient application of available disease control measures.

In this study, we have characterized the mitochondrial diversity of 81 swine from Uganda. Median-joining network analysis of D-loop sequences from these individuals and others characterized in previous studies allowed us to determine that Ugandan pigs cluster with populations from the West (Europe/North Africa), Far East and India. In addition, partial sequencing of the Y-chromosome UTY locus in 18 Ugandan domestic pigs revealed the segregation of a single HY1 lineage that has a cosmopolitan distribution. A Western and Far Eastern ancestry for East African pigs had been already reported, but this is the first study demonstrating an additional contribution from the Indian porcine gene pool. This result is consistent with the high frequency of zebuine alleles in cattle from East Africa. The geographic coordinates of East Africa, at the crossroads of many trading routes that, through the ages, linked Europe, Africa and Asia, might explain the rich and complex genetic heritage of livestock native to this area., We are greatly indebted to the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) under the framework of Sida-Mak Bilateral Research Support Programme Phase 3 to the Post Doc program at the Directorate of Graduate and Research Training for the financial support (Grant No. 75007369, Swedish Research Links, contract number 348-2011-7380).