Dr Judy Bettridge trained as a veterinary surgeon at the University of Liverpool, where she returned after five years in clinical practice to complete a Masters in Veterinary Infection and Disease Control. This was followed by a PhD in veterinary epidemiology and infection ecology in scavenging chickens in Ethiopia, in collaboration with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). Subsequently, Judy held a postdoctoral research position based out of ILRI Nairobi, Kenya, exploring the effects of poverty and livestock-keeping on zoonotic disease transmission in urban environments. She returned to the UK in 2018 and worked for a period in the civil service as a senior epidemiologist at the Animal and Plant Health Agency, before joining the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Greenwich in 2020.

Judy’s current research covers a variety of topics relating to food safety, food systems and the epidemiology and surveillance of bacterial pathogens.

• Mounsey, Oliver, et al. (2024) Genomic epidemiology of third-generation cephalosporin-resistant Escherichia coli from Argentinian pig and dairy farms reveals animal-specific patterns of co-resistance and resistance mechanisms. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 90 (3). pp. 1-17. (doi: 10.1128/aem.01791-23)
• Bettridge, Judy, et al. (2023) Using SNP addresses for Salmonella Typhimurium DT104 in routine veterinary outbreak detection. Epidemiology and Infection, 151:e187. pp. 1-14. (doi: 10.1017/S0950268823001723)
• Muloi, Dishon, et al. (2022) Population genomics of Escherichia coli in livestock-keeping households across a rapidly developing urban landscape. Nature Microbiology, 7. pp. 581-589. (doi: 10.1038/s41564-022-01079-y)
• Bettridge, Judy , Thomas, Lian, Mutua, Florence, Pal, Himadri and Grace, Delia (2022) Review of food safety training in low- and middle-income countries. Report. Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, Washington, DC.
• Bettridge, Judy, Psifidi, Androniki, Terfa, Zelalem G., Desta, Takele T., Lozano-Jaramillo, Maria, Dessie, Tadelle, Kaiser, Pete, Wigley, Paul, Hanotte, Olivier and Christley, Robert M. (2018) The role of local adaptation in sustainable production of village chickens. Nature Sustainability, 1 (10). pp. 574-582. ISSN 2398-9629 (Online) (doi: 10.1038/s41893-018-0150–9)

Dr. Bettridge’s work is broad, and has spanned a variety of animal and pathogen species combinations. She is interested in systems-thinking approaches, understanding trade-offs, and incorporating multivariate statistics, metrics and qualitative evaluations in user-friendly ways to evaluate complex outcomes.

Examples include working with the Argentinian dairy sector to explore options for setting up monitoring of antimicrobial usage; and why adopting a single metric that allows international country-level comparisons (mg/PCU) may be less useful to farmers than metrics that break down usage by animal age, drug class and administration route. Although the latter requires more data recording effort, it can help users pinpoint areas for interventions (such as vaccines, hygiene or management changes) that help reduce disease and hence the need for antimicrobial therapies.

Another example of Judy’s work evaluated how a new method of bacterial typing based on genomics (the SNP address) might be combined with existing surveillance tools for early outbreak detection. The additional resolution of bacterial strains provided by genomic typing methods adds complexity, because of the very large number of strains that can be identified, compared to traditional methods, such as phage-typing. However, it lends itself well to surveillance, especially when combined with a method that identifies expanding spatial clusters.

Judy has also worked on evaluating the multiple components that go into the design of successful approaches to food safety training in LMICs. This work used a qualitative evaluation framework drawing on behavioural and educational theories to assess approach, audience, context and curricula, and made a number of recommendations to help food safety educators design and evaluate their own programmes.

• CDT programme – Introduction to Quantitative Research Methods; Statistics Clinics (with Andrew Mead, Rothamsted Research)
• ENV-1096 Research Methods for postgraduates module – two lectures on software, data management and introductory statistics
• ENV-1192 Introduction to Ecological Modelling and Programming. Guest lecture on modelling animal roaming behaviours

“FARMS-SAFE” (Future-proofing Antibacterial resistance Risk Management Surveillance and Stewardship in the Argentinian Farming Environment), led by the University of Bristol and Universidad Nacional De La Plata, Argentina.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global threat to health and development. Argentina, has well-established monitoring of medicine use and resistance withing the human health sector, but no equivalent programmes for the veterinary sector, food or environment. This project has created a surveillance structure to measure use and resistance in the dairy and pig industries and is training researchers who can continue to monitor and evaluate interventions to reduce medicine usage and AMR in the future.

“RodentGate” is a project led by the University of Antwerp, investigating the role of rodents in and around pig and poultry farms in the EU and UK as reservoirs of livestock diseases, and projecting what may happen under more stringent control of rodenticides. Ecologically-based rodent management allows controls to be precisely targeted, which requires understanding the rodent demography, life history, space use, dispersal capacities, pathogen presence and transmission patterns in the rodent population.

NRI is leading a workpackage evaluating the presence and diversity of relevant pathogens in wild rodents in and around pig and poultry farms, and has to date detected a variety of bacterial pathogens in rodents, including Leptospira, Brachyspira, Lawsonia and Salmonella,  as well as antibiotic resistant bacterial strains of Enterobacteriaceae.

The RodentGate project has been extended, in collaboration with APHA, to include a postgraduate research student who is exploring the longitudinal genetic diversity of Salmonella in rodents and pigs on a case study farm and evaluating the implications for genomic typing and surveillance.

NRI Mid-career Researcher Network Representative (Food and Markets Department)

• Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons
• Member of the British Veterinary Association and the Society for Veterinary Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine
• Awarded the N.E. Roberts prize: Infection-interactions in Ethiopian village chickens (2014, University of Liverpool Institute of Infection and Global Health)