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Establishment of a PPR Global Research and Expertise Network (PPR-GREN)

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From:
Paul Rossiter <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Paul Rossiter <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sat, 15 Feb 2014 10:41:24 +0000
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Dear colleagues, 

I am not a PPR specialist so please excuse any mistake.
I am working for Cirad and consider myself as a disease ecologist specialized on wildlife/domestic interfaces. I have been involved with Richard Kock during the last year of the PACE project as a wildlife expert, then with AIV issues in Africa and am based in Zimbabwe since 2006 working amongst other things on bTB, FMD and other diseases transmission between wildlife and cattle. I will be involved with Richard, Geneviève and many others on the IUEPPR project in Africa.

As researchers, field veterinarians, animal health managers, farmers or consumers, if we share a common goal of PPR eradication we will all have different approaches and agendas to complete this objective. The success of it will partly reside in the compromises that each of us will be ready to do with our own convictions. The right path does not belong to anyone but is somewhere in a collaborative space that I believe this type of conference can help identifying.

I am therefore a bit worried that I have not seen any contribution from colleagues from southern Africa in this e-conf so far. Southern Africa is at risk of PPR introduction and reading about your experiences clearly points at difficult experiences in the future for southern African small-scale farmers when PPR will spread in naive populations as it did in East Africa. Eradicating PPR means also stopping its spatial spread on the African continent and avoiding additional eradication campaign in new areas. SADC has developed a document on PPR risk, surveillance and control strategy, but it seems (but I could be wrong) that only the areas under direct risk benefit from attention. Given small ruminants informal trade routes, more or less known in southern Africa, given the spread of FMD  strains amongst cattle populations (and very recently a hypothesis about its spread through small ruminants), we can expect PPR spread far south into southern Africa
 before we detect it if surveillance and awareness are not implemented in the region. As Richard pointed at, pathologies detected in the wildlife industry that could call for PPR diagnosis do not raise any alert. This should not be.

Therefore, an important part of a PPR eradication programme should take into account unaffected zones at risk of PPR spread (the all of southern Africa), sending effective wake-up call to stakeholders who do not perceive the level of risk under which they are. A surveillance scheme in unaffected zones (using for example sentinel domestic and wildlife populations based on the extended network of wildlife hunting in southern Africa could be of huge interest) will in addition provide information on naive populations that could be used as control samples for the development of diagnostic.

Best Regards,

Alexandre 
Alexandre Caron
DVM, PhD
CIRAD - UPR AGIRs
Department Environment and Societies 
P.O. Box 1378
Harare, Zimbabwe
Tel: + (263) 4 332 484-7
Office Cell: + (263) 772 253 176
Perso Cell: + (263) 773 474 294
http://agents.cirad.fr/index.php/Alexandre+CARON
http://ur-agirs.cirad.fr/
www.rp-pcp.org

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