The Boma

Can one chicken make a difference to a child's health?

• International Livestock Research Institute • Season 3 • Episode 1

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In 2014 a survey found that a quarter of children under 5 in Siaya County, western Kenya, were stunted. Stunting creates lifelong, chronic health issues and worse mental development. Better nutrition can help avoid stunting, but can be a struggle for families that are already lacking money, resources and access to support.

What if there was a way to empower families by improving a simple resource they already have? Such as chickens, a small but ubiquitous livestock in rural communities. But proving this is not so easy. In our new episode of The Boma, we dive into the questions and answers to see if there really is a link between poultry and children's health.

The study this episode reports on was a finalist for the 2022 Cozzarelli Prize, an award that recognizes outstanding contributions to the scientific disciplines represented by the National Academy of Sciences.

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Scripted by Annabel Slater, Digital Media Specialist at ILRI.

Can one chicken make a difference?

Welcome back to The Boma, a podcast from the International Livestock Research Institute looking at how sustainable livestock is building better lives in the Global South. I’m Annabel Slater, taking over as host for the third season of The Boma. I’d like to start by thanking our presenters for last season, Brenda Coromina and Elliot Carleton. 

In today’s episode I’m asking – how much difference can one chicken make to a child’s health?

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Out on the shore of Lake Victoria, western Kenya, lies Siaya County. It’s a quiet, mostly rural place. Less than 10% of households have piped water, and even fewer have electricity. Most people depend on their own fishing and small-scale farming for work and for food.

Siaya might look peaceful, but it has its problems. There’s a lot of infectious disease in the region, and families don’t always have enough to eat. In 2014, a survey found that a quarter of children under 5 years old were stunted. 

Stunting means a child is well below the average size for their age. It can be caused by poor nutrition, or by infectious diseases. Worse, the effects of stunting continue into adulthood, holding back a person’s cognitive ability, and causing chronic health issues.

So here’s the question. How can we improve children’s health in places like Siaya? 

Researchers are looking for answers. They include Elkanah Otiang, a veterinarian working with the Kenya Medical Research Institute. He took me on a trip to learn more from four households in Siaya County.

A typical rural household here consists of several buildings for different family members, all grouped loosely together on a single plot of land. 

People here are poor. On average, a family might earn less than two dollars a day. They want to feed their children well, but how is this possible if they are lacking money, resources, and access to support?

Well, here’s one way that helps. 

In most rural households, people keep chickens. Around the household, you might see a mother hen hustling her chicks along, or hear a rooster making his presence known. 

One farmer, Cynthia Wa Rebeca, told us more.

Interviewee 2:

It helps sometimes. Maybe you want to do something and you don't have money. You can take one. You can sell then it helps you there. Or maybe you have visitors you don’t have something to eat you can take one.

A chicken may be small, but it is useful. I wondered what people did with the eggs the chickens lay – did they sell them? Here’s Elkanah translating another farmer’s answer.

Interviewee 4

So they don't sell chicken eggs. Yeah they only eat them.

Yeah. So. So for eggs, uh, preparation is the standard way, that they fry and have it with ugali. Chicken is a bit special so uh, accompaniment is rice or or chapati. 
 
 

Ugali is the maize porridge that is the main starchy staple, and an egg or a bit of meat makes it special, and nutritious. So eggs are valuable food for the household. One household said they got between 7-15 eggs every two weeks, from their 10 hens. 

So, if we want children to eat better – maybe we should help households gain bigger flocks of chickens?

Well, hold that idea. First, you need to answer another question. If chickens are so great, why aren’t households keeping more chickens anyway? Here’s one answer from farmer Joseph Wanyango Otieno.

Interviewer: So is keeping chickens easy?

Interviewee 2: Not very.

Keeping chicken needs a lot because they need to be confined, which I have not confined my chicken. So that's a challenge. They need to be fed. They need to be vaccinated. Lot of usually the disease control. So it's not so much easy. We are just trying.

Feed, housing, cost of vaccines are just some of the reasons that household flocks here tend to be small, around 10 chickens on average. 

But in his research, Elkanah Otiang found a bigger reason. Chickens also keep dying, because of one particular disease. 

Here’s Zoe Campbell, an ILRI researcher specializing in gender and animal health issues, and a member of the study team, to explain more:


Zoe:

So Newcastle disease is one of the biggest problems for chicken producers. It will kill almost all of your chickens and it does it very quickly and it comes around year after year. So if you talk to if you talk to people, even with really small flocks, invariably in any chicken study and say, hey, you know what, things are most difficult for you in terms of disease or production challenges for smaller scale folks who don't have a lot of veterinary access.

One of the first things they'll talk about is Newcastle Disease

Newcastle disease was first found near and named after the city of Newcastle in northern England, but the disease is found worldwide. It’s caused by a virus and infects all sorts of birds.

There is a vaccine for Newcastle disease, in fact there are a few. So, if people might have bigger flocks of chickens if not for Newcastle disease, mayne the next question is this - why aren’t people living in Siaya County buying the vaccine?

Elkanah: 

So on, on the issues of vaccine, um, what, what was our overall understanding initially that there was no public awareness abo ut the existence of the vaccine it benefits and that could be, say, could be attributed to the fact that the government, for example, is not giving sufficient extension services.

So up to only about 2% within the study site were offering any disease control or husbandry practices to all the livestock that they kept.

That included chicken, cattle, sheep and goats. So this vaccine, as much as it does exist, public awareness is not that very high. But again, there is no bigger incentive of vaccinating the rural chicken, considering that they only own about 10 and the number of them when infection strikes instead of mortality, which is attributed to death, some people would consume them before they die.

So the incentive to vaccinate this chicken is still not very high, considering that vaccinating up to ten chicken would be about $1.5. And the willingness to buy is actually not very well adopted. Yeah.

 

But … seeing is believing.  Supposing we gave subsidized or free vaccine for Newcastle disease to households. We protect the health of the chickens, which might persuade farmers that vaccination is a good idea.

 More chickens means more eggs, means better nutrition for children in the household… right?

Well, although that is a very attractive idea … it is actually really hard to test. 


Zoe: 

the hard part, especially for children's nutrition, is when you want to connect something that you were doing in terms of the household livestock with children's nutrition - it's hard to measure that because there's a lag in time and it takes a lot of time, so say they get more cows today, how long will that take to influence a child's growth? A lot of time, often longer than most studies are. 

And there are also there are some negative pathways. So if we think about nutrition. Basically it's great for a child's having more access to animals source foods in their house. But sometimes livestock get sold rather than actually directly being consumed. And then maybe that many might be used to buy food, or maybe it might use to buy something else. So things sort of trickle away.

And then there’s the chance that having more livestock around is not automatically a good thing. 

Zoe: 

And we also know that there are some negative consequences for children in households with livestock. Maybe they're exposed to more pathogens. A child under five is going to have diarrhea, so crawling around in their environment and touching a bunch of fecal material and putting their hands in their mouths as kids do. Right. And so that can negatively affect getting sick more they’re not absorbing nutrients as well. 

All of which means it’s not so clear cut that having more chickens will boost children’s health. And there isn’t much in the way of existing evidence. 

But Elkanah and the team set out to find what would happen. They contacted 500 households in Siaya County, and an animal health technician gave chickens in half the households the Newcastle disease vaccine, while the other half got a placebo. They followed up to see what happened to flock size. And they measured the height and weight of 700 children from those households, over 18 months. []

First, what happened to flock size?

Elkanah:

We found that that sample size that there was only an improvement in the number of lot by one chicken, although that was translating up to 8% overall flock size. Uh, the connection didn't appear to be very, very impactful initially.

Hmm. Just one chicken? These results don’t seem big enough to impress the kinds of donors and policymakers who might be able to subsidise Newcastle disease vaccinations. 

But Elkanah says, let’s not forget that this is a new and powerful kind of study because it adopts the One Health approach. It looks specifically at connections between human and animal health.. 

Elkanah:

One of the things that has now become very prominent among, uh, practitioners within the health field is the One Health approach looking at the connections between human and animal health. So it's the greatest contributor in enhancing a view of a direct connection.

So in the previous instances, you’d get clearly studies have been conducted that looked at the impact of interventions on chicken and the productivity of similar aspects. You’d get milk supplements being given to children elsewhere, feed supplement be given to to others, only only supported with counselling, but not looking at how they interact in the environment and interactions also had an impact. So typically this adopted a One Health approach that comprehensively looked at the human and animal health connections.

And this intervention – giving vaccines for chickens – has advantages over, say, trying to give villagers larger livestock. I asked Elkanah what he would say to someone questioning whether the study results were worth it.

Elkanah:

Well, the income streams for many of these rural communities, are not there. So they obviously need something and something that they already have, and they're accustomed to keeping them. So you don't need a lot of behavioral influences to change their attitude. 

So those would be asking these questions from elsewhere, um, would not have a very good grasp of how the situation in rural communities in Africa look like. In Kenya in particular. 

Yeah. So, so important to appreciate the poverty challenges or the economic challenges that results in to poverty here and try to start at the lowest level bottom up kind of way. To improve what does exist at the local level, as you are sent upwards.

 

Because here’s the thing. Flock size increased by one chicken. And though one chicken might not sound like a lot, an extra bird means extra chicks, or extra meat, or extra eggs. Just one extra egg a week provides around 8 grams of protein, 6 grams of fat, and a bunch of useful micronutrients which can make a lasting difference to a child’s growth.

And best of all – the researchers proved this. They found boys and girls from households that received the vaccine both ate 24% more high-protein food. This led to them growing taller, and gaining more weight.

So one chicken can make a huge difference. It’  s a clear example of how protecting animal health also benefits human health. An intervention like subsidising a vaccine might seem simple, but consider this – 7.8 million people live in rural Kenyan communities like these. That’s a lot of people who could benefit.


Zoe:

I think at the end of the day there's a lot of interest in development type interventions that can be targeted towards more rural and poorer households.

And I have heard from some donors of these types of development interventions that sometimes they have a hard time trying to figure out how to engage with those kinds of households. Right. Maybe it's easier to engage, especially in livestock with a business or a commercial entity.

So I think the other thing that's exciting is it's giving an example of a development intervention that could have really, really great impacts and is also catered specifically to what that group of people needs in their chicken production.

Zoe also says a key finding is that both girls and boys benefited.


Zoe:

in some other studies in western Kenya, growth scores, scores for girls are lower than for boys.

So or worse, they're having worse growth outcomes when they're under five than boys. And interestingly, in this study, the benefit was both for girls and boys. So this was one of the analysis that I asked for when the team was doing their efforts. I said, What? Let's check. Is it different for girls or boys? Is it possible that maybe boys, as they sometimes are for a variety of different cultural reasons, or who knows why they're maybe getting preferential access to food or animal sourced foods? They're growing better than girls, their peers in in western Kenya. But it looks like this intervention is good for both boys and girls. So that's also pretty exciting to see.

 And here’s a final reflection from Joseph Wanyango Otieno, who we heard from earlier.


Interviewer:

So after this study there anything like you learned or noticed about the chicken after the study?

Interviewee 1:

Yeah. During that time at least our chickens were safe, death rate was low. And again we were informed the importance of keeping the chicken around. It helps the nutrition factor. It also helps food security. Yes. So these are the things that we learned from the study.

 

I asked Elkanah what he’d like to see next based on this research.
 

Elkanah:

most important, I would love to see an adoption and implementation of vaccination programs for the rural communities within our Ministry of Agriculture.

it would be nice to see the other diseases incorporated in in the intervention so that it's just not a single disease condition and see if we could have a bigger impact.

So we only picked one disease condition and that was Newcastle which causes mortality or flock losses of up to 50%. We talk about infection, but the other 50% are also other significant diseases that affect chicken, including salmonella infections and fowl pest.

I asked at the beginning whether one chicken could make a difference.  Hope you’ll agree now that it definitely can. Let’s hope that the results of this study can have influence on government or donors.

In the meantime, thanks for joining me on The Boma. I’d love to hear your feedback on today’s episode or the whole podcast series. So please reach out on Twitter at BomaPodcast to let us know your thoughts, and also, what topics you’d like us to cover moving forward. If you enjoyed today’s episode, why not leave a rating to help others find the show. And please don’t forget to share and subscribe.