FAO warns of spread of rinderpest

One of the world's deadliest livestock disease is on the verge of spreading from its last stronghold in northeastern Kenya and southern Somalia, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has warned. "The Somali pastoral ecosystem is our great challenge now," said Dr Peter Roeder, Secretary of the FAO Global Rinderpest Eradication Programme, which is working to eradicate the disease by 2010. "It is almost certainly the last refuge of the rinderpest virus in the world." Not only are nearby areas of Africa 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 southeast Asia, the FAO statement warned. The disease - which does not affect humans - can kill entire herds belonging to small-scale dairy farmers or tribal herders who depend on cattle for their food and livelihoods. The last outbreak of the disease in Africa in 1982 to 1984 caused losses of US $2 billion, the FAO said. Dr Roeder noted that the disease has, in the past, broken out of the Somalia ecosystem and spread as far as eastern Kenya and into Tanzania, most recently in the 1990s. "The world is very vulnerable to a devastating resurgence of rinderpest, should progress falter," he stated. “Recent reports that traders are arranging to start exporting cattle to southeast Asia are also most disturbing, raising fears that the virus may reinfect a part of the world free from the disease since the 1950s,” he added. The statement noted that experts were increasingly confident that the recent national eradication campaigns had freed three of the last remaining reservoirs of rinderpest - in Sudan, Pakistan and Yemen - from the disease.