Dear Colleagues,
We have reached the end of the first week of the conference and many thanks go to the fifty or so participants who submitted contributions and/or follow-up comments.
By and large the positive and negative factors being flagged and discussed are ones that have been foreseen and prioritized in other fora, which means we are all on the right track. Encouragingly we have had a good balance between ideas and experience from field workers and policy makers as well the laboratory gurus. Initial contributions tended to concentrate on vaccination but after a reminder from Dr Nzeitcheung we started to hear more about epidemiology (or at least serum antibody prevalences) which is important because you cannot have one without the other in progressive control. At the end of next week I will try to summarise what we have discussed and then we will move into sessions two and three to identify the main topics and sub-topics
(and already there are a lot of them) to include in a functioning research and experience network. One important topic, however, which has received scant attention being briefly mentioned in two or three contributions, is the economics of controlling and eradicating PPR. Probably the best papers on the economic advantage of eradicating rinderpest were written after it was actually eradicated. Do we want that to be the case for PPR or should we be doing something now to convince policy makers and donors?
The proposed role of the network is to inform and accelerate a global strategy for the progressive control of PPR. From what I have read and learned this week I get the feeling that the final end game in eradicating PPR, some years away, is probably in safe hands and being addressed by the laboratories with new vaccines and DIVA based serological techniques etc., though probably much still to agree on eventually. I suspect that the mid-term game in which we will have a good idea of where the virus is with agreed methodologies on what to do about it is also something that we can more confidently look forward to – at least at this stage. But I have some trouble in seeing how we start things now, how
we move from relatively uncoordinated vaccinations campaigns without disease information to a cohesive epidemiologically based programme. So if you have some ideas, perhaps innovative ones, of how we can do that, then there is still plenty to contribute to this conference not just from those who have already joined in but the other 170 of you out there who may just have been waiting for week two. We have had inputs from the private sector but some more from them and from NGOs working with PPR will also be appreciated.
Enjoy your weekend – moderator.