Deadly 'cattle plague' near official eradication as global effort ends

[News_Editor]

Deadly 'cattle plague' near official eradication as global effort ends

2010-10-15 10:01:38 GMT+7 (ICT)

ROME (BNO NEWS) -- A global effort to battle rinderpest, best known as cattle plague, has led the disease to the brink of extinction and is expected to be officially declared eradicated next year.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on Thursday announced that it will soon end all field activities to battle disease as it believes the disease has been fully eradicated.

If confirmed by the United Nations next year, it will be the first time in history that humankind has succeeded in wiping out an animal disease in the wild. It will also be the second time, after smallpox in 1980, that a disease has been eliminated as a direct result of human efforts.

Rinderpest does not affect humans directly, but its ability to cause swift, massive losses of cattle and other hoofed animals has led to devastating effects on agriculture for millennia, leaving famine and economic devastation in its wake.

"The control and elimination of rinderpest has always been a priority for the Organization since its early days in its mission to defeat hunger and strengthen global food security," FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf said as ministers, animal health experts and partners gathered in Rome for a Global Rinderpest Eradication Symposium.

The meeting got underway as representatives from many of FAO's member countries prepared to take part in the World Food Day 2010 observance, whose theme is "United Against Hunger." That day will take place on October 15.

"The disease has affected Europe, Asia and Africa for centuries and has caused widespread famine and decimated millions of animals, both domestic and wild. In the 1880s, rinderpest caused losses of up to one million head of cattle in Russia and central Europe," said Diouf.

It is believed that rinderpest killed millions of livestock and wildlife in Africa in the 19th century, resulting in widespread famine. That pandemic alone, the United Nations estimates, resulted in the deaths of up to one-third of the human population of Ethiopia who starved to death.

The last known outbreak of rinderpest occurred in Kenya in 2001 and the final remaining pockets of the disease were probably cleared from Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya by 2007. An official announcement of global rinderpest eradication is expected in mid-2011, pending a review of final official disease status reports from several countries to the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE).

"We are confident that the World Assembly of Delegates of the OIE will officially recognize all remaining countries as free from the disease in May 2011 and thus close on that day OIE Pathway activities for rinderpest eradication," said OIE Director General Dr. Bernard Vallat. "The OIE programme was launched back in 1989 and has been extremely reliable in assessing the presence or absence of the virus in all countries worldwide. It should serve future ventures in eradicating other animal diseases."

Chris Oura, a veterinary scientist at the Institute for Animal Health in England called Thursday's announcement a major achievement. He said an effective vaccine against the virus has been around since the 1950s but argues it was not applied in the concerted manner needed to stamp out the disease. "It was clear that although the vaccine was being used, it wasn’t being used efficiently," he said.

Better field diagnostics and improvements in the vaccine that made it last longer in tough environments made possible the launch of an eradication campaign in 1994, led by the FAO and the World Organization for Animal Health in Paris.

"Once animals were vaccinated across all the effected countries, the work really began, because that’s when you had to prove that it wasn’t there anymore,â€" Oura said. Tests cannot differentiate an infected animal from a vaccinated one, so officials ceased vaccination to conclusively prove that the virus was gone.

Oura thinks the rinderpest eradication campaign could serve as a model for eliminating other veterinary diseases, particularly a closely related virus affecting goats and sheep called peste de petits ruminants (PPR).

"PPR is spreading very rapidly across Africa and Asia, and this could be eradicated using exactly the same model as rinderpest. The vaccine is there; the tools are there," he added.

-- © BNO News All rights reserved 2010-10-15

[happyrobert]

So, we can "eradicate" a world wide disease for cows, but not a single disease for humans (other than smallpox 40 years ago and we're saving that one in the freezer just in case big pharma isn't making enough some year).