UN halts campaign against "nearly extinct" cattle plague rinderpest

Oct 14, 2010, 13:50 GMT

Rome - The United Nations announced Thursday it has halted an international 16-year long campaign to eliminate rinderpest because the deadly cattle disease has been been brought 'to the brink of extinction.'

Caused by a virus, rinderpest does not affect humans directly but has destroyed millions of cattle, buffalo, yaks and their wild relatives, with mortality rates in extreme cases reaching close to 100 per cent.

However global rinderpest eradication is expected to be officially declared in mid-2011, pending a review of final official disease status reports from a handful of countries, the Rome-based UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said in a statement.

'It would be the first time in history that humankind has succeeded in wiping out an animal disease in the wild, and only the second time, after smallpox in 1980, that a disease has been eliminated thanks to human efforts,' FAO said.

FAO together with the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE). spearheaded the launch in 1994 of the Global Rinderpest Eradication Programme (GREP).

'It was the decisive, final push in a decades-long campaign of scientific research, field surveillance and vaccination of animals in the field,' FAO said.

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.

When it entered Africa in the 19th century, it decimated millions of heads of livestock and wildlife and triggered widespread famine.

It is estimated that in that pandemic alone, up to one-third of the human population of Ethiopia died of starvation as a result.

In the early 1980s, rinderpest was still ravaging livestock herds around the world, with devastating epidemics hitting South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Losses in Nigeria in the 1980s totalled 2 billion dollars and a 1994 outbreak in northern Pakistan wiped out more than 50 000 cattle and buffalo before being brought under control.

The last known outbreak of rinderpest occurred in 2001 in Kenya.

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