Current Limitations in the Control and Spread of Ticks that Affect Livestock: A Review

Agustín Estrada-Peña and Mo Salman
Additional contact information
Agustín Estrada-Peña: Department of Animal Pathology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Zaragoza, Spain
Mo Salman: Animal Population Health Institute, College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1644, USA

Agriculture, 2013, vol. 3, issue 2, 1-15

Abstract: Ticks are well-known parasites that affect livestock productivity. This paper reviews the current knowledge regarding the spread of ticks with their impact in animal health and the limitations to achieve effective control measures. The forecasted trends in climate play an obvious role in promoting the spread of ticks in several regions. It appears that climate warming is pivotal in the spread and colonization of new territories by Rhipicephalus microplus in several regions of Africa. The reported increase in altitude of this tick species in the mountainous regions of Central and South America appears to be driven by such general trends in climate change. This factor, however, is not the only single contributor to the spread of ticks. The poor management of farms, uncontrolled movements of domestic animals, abundance of wild animals, and absence of an adequate framework to capture the ecological plasticity of certain ticks may explain the complexity of the control measures. In this paper, we review several details regarding the relationships of ticks with the environment, wild fauna and competition with other species of ticks. Our intention is to highlight these relationships with the aim to produce a coherent framework to explore tick ecology and its relationship with animal production systems.

Keywords: ticks; domestic animals; climate; spread; control strategies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/3/2/221/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/3/2/221/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jagris:v:3:y:2013:i:2:p:221-235:d:24879

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture is currently edited by Ms. Leda Xuan

More articles in Agriculture from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().