(i) A broadcast-quality video on rinderpest is available for TV stations from FAO Media Production Unit. If all stakeholders seize the opportunity to work together with the Pan-African programme for the control of epizootics of the African Union's inter-African bureau of animal resources, and FAO, the prospects are better now than ever before. The virus must be eradicated by the end of 2003, followed by years of verification and virus containment, including steps such as destroying laboratory samples of the virus, for the goal of a global declaration of complete freedom from rinderpest to be realized on schedule by the end of 2010. The FAO is now urging the international community to provide additional resources and intensify efforts to search for and destroy the virus where it is active, through targeted vaccination in Kenya and Somalia. "Less than 50 years ago the Rome zoo suffered a rinderpest outbreak from virus introduced with Somali antelopes."Ī non-governmental organization coalition working for the Pan-African programme for the control of epizootics in southern Somalia has provided valuable details of the extent of the area in which the virus has survived. "It is quite possible to move viruses around the world with a few hundred animals. This raises fears that the virus may reinfect a part of the world free from the disease since the 1950s." Recent reports that traders are arranging to start exporting cattle to Southeast Asia are also most disturbing. "The virus has repeatedly broken out of the Somali ecosystem before and spread as far as eastern Kenya and into the United Republic of Tanzania, most recently in the mid 1990s, affecting cattle and killing wildlife. ![]() ![]() "The world is very vulnerable to a devastating resurgence of rinderpest should progress falter", warns Dr. "It is almost certainly the last refuge of the rinderpest virus in the world." Peter Roeder, Secretary of the FAO Global Rinderpest Eradication Programme, which is working to eradicate the disease by 2010. "The Somali pastoral ecosystem is our great challenge now", says Dr. But while the virus persists in the southern part of the so-called Somali pastoral ecosystem, not only nearby areas of Africa are at risk from reinfection by the movement of cattle, but trade in cattle could carry the virus across the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula or, according to recent reports, even further afield to South-East Asia. ![]() In Africa in 1982-1984, a rinderpest outbreak caused losses of $2 billion.Įxperts are increasingly confident that recent national eradication campaigns have freed three of the last remaining reservoirs of the virus - in Sudan, Pakistan and Yemen - of the disease. Livelihoods based on cattle, buffaloes and yaks are at risk as is the wildlife heritage of Africa. While human beings cannot catch rinderpest, by killing entire herds that belong to small-scale dairy farmers or tribal herders who depend utterly on cattle for their food and livelihoods, the highly infectious disease can kill humans just as surely - by famine. ROME, 20 November (FAO) - Recent progress in eradicating rinderpest - one of the world's most devastating livestock diseases - risks being reversed as the rinderpest virus threatens to break out of its last stronghold in northeastern Kenya and southern Somalia, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned today. PROGRESS AGAINST RINDERPEST - LIVESTOCK DISEASE - THREATENED AS RE-EMERGENCEįAO Says Pastoral Ecosystem at Risk, Continued Eradication Efforts Needed
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