ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2018. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution,  
and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ISDS 2018 Conference Abstracts

Farm Biosecurity at backyard poultry of Bangladesh 
and its role in spread of HPAI
Muhammad Asaduzzaman*
International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Objective
We have conducted this study to characterise the movement and 

contact patterns of poultry in Bangladesh that could be associated 
with transmission of newly-introduced subtypes of avian influenza 
virus in two districts of Bangladesh as well as to summarise the 
patterns arising from the network analysis in a way that can inform 
the parameterisation of spatially explicit stochastic models of 
transmission of newly-introduced subtypes of avian influenza virus 
in the two types of areas.

Introduction
Bangladesh is a South Asian country with large human and 

poultry populations which is highly affected with frequent outbreaks 
of both high and low pathogenic avian influenza since 2007. Very 
few studies have been carried out to reveal the farm biosecurity at 
backyard poultry that might have contributed to the spread of avian 
influenza in Bangladesh, specially rural areas. Therefore, we aimed 
to characterize biosecurity practices of poultry farm including the 
movement of live birds which is a well-known risk factor for the 
geographic dissemination of the virus among poultry flocks and 
personnel hygiene of poultry workers for rapid detection and effective 
risk management of incursion of HPAI and LPAI viruses.

Methods
This cross sectional survey was carried out using a pretested 

questionnaire in backyard Poultry holdings of Kalkini Upazila of 
Madaripur district in Dhaka division which has a relatively low 
proportion of commercial poultry farms and high proportion of 
backyard poultry holdings. 1-mode and 2-mode social network 
analysis was also carried out to show the farm to farm movements. 
From each primarily selected farm, details of the last 2 movements of 
live poultry along with source/destination details was collected with 
pre-tested questionnaire. Later, data was stored in Epi-Info, analysed 
with STATA 14 and UCINET. 315 backyard HH from 2 villages of 
Kalkini Upazila, Madaripur District were randomly selected.

Results
The study revealed that majority backyard farm owners do not 

maintain the standard biosecurity measures whereas a significant 
amount of the study included farms rear multiple poultry species. No 
poultry workers were found to use any personal protective equipment 
(PPEs) while cleaning the litter/mats (Figure 2). The farms with 
multiple poultry species feed them in same container and keep them 
in same shed which is a major risk factor for disease transmission. 
Movement patterns differed in a number of aspects (Table 1) and 
this information is useful for the establishment of the movement 
parameter settings in a simulation model of avian influenza incursion.

Conclusions
The findings on farm biosecurity practices and movement pattern 

from this study will support to develop risk-based surveillance and 
contingency policies as well as to minimize the spread between 
poultry units and also from poultry to people for novel AI viruses in 
Bangladesh.

Farm to Farm Movement of Live Birds (1-Mode Network Analysis)

Figure 1. Study Area



ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2018. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution,  
and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ISDS 2018 Conference Abstracts

Figure 2. Biosecurity Practices in Backyard Farms of Madaripur District

Keywords
Farm Biosecurity; HPAI; Backyard Poultry

Acknowledgments
We thank European Commission for funding and implementation of this 
work.

*Muhammad Asaduzzaman
E-mail: asaduzzaman@icddrb.org

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * 10(1):e128, 2018