UN food agency starts campaign to wipe out sheep plague

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Organization for Animal Health ( OAH) on Tuesday outlined in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, a 15-year campaign to wipe out sheep and goat plague, a UN spokesman told reporters here.
"This livestock disease is one of the major risks to their food security and livelihood of hundreds of millions of rural families, " Farhan Haq, the deputy UN spokesman, said at a daily news briefing here. "The plague, known by its French acronym PPR -- for Peste des Petits Ruminants -- has expanded rapidly in the past 15 years."
The new campaign can help the world definitively stamp out a plague that devastates sheep and goats, freeing hundreds of millions of rural families from one of the major risks to their food security and livelihood.
Until now, rinderpest is the only animal disease to have been eradicated. FAO and its partners led the effort and declared that catastrophic cattle plague, the cause of famines and the collapse of empires, effectively extinct in 2011.
PPR is a virus closely related to rinderpest, sharing traits that make it an apt target for an outright eradication campaign: an inexpensive, safe and reliable vaccine exists, as do simple diagnostic tests, while the virus has a relatively short infectious phase and does not survive for long outside a host.
The PPR disease, which now runs rampant in around 70 countries across South and East Asia, Africa and the Middle East, is said to be able to kill as many as 90 percent of the animals if they are infected with it.
There are ample economic incentives to target complete eradication of PPR. Some 2.1 billion small ruminants worldwide -- 80 percent of them in affected regions -- represent an important asset for a third of poor rural households in developing countries.
Goats and sheep readily adapt to harsh environments, require little fixed-capital investment such as barns, provide year-round protein and dairy products as well as income from wool and leather, improve fertility of the soil, and serve as a "mobile bank." As women often own and tend sheep and goats, the animals have an important role in the pursuit of greater gender equity, industry observers say.
The disease, which provokes high fever, rapid emaciation and respiratory collapse, causes annual losses of between 1.45 billion U.S. dollars and 2.1 billion U.S. dollars worldwide each year, a figure that does not include indirect losses linked to restrictions on trade and livestock mobility triggered by outbreaks.