Epidemiologist for the Collaborative Centres in Nairobi and N_Djamena.

Rinderpest was first introduced to the African continent in 1841 and it first appeared south of the Sahara in 1884, after infected cattle were imported from India. The resulting epidemic killed over 90% of the indigenous cattle and wildlife population in Sub-Saharan Africa and up to 75% of Egyptian cattle and buffaloes. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Joint Project Campaign (JP15) was initiated. It resulted in the vaccination of over 70 million cattle with the tissue culture vaccine. The JP15 campaign ended in 1969 and 1976 in West Africa and East Africa, respectively; by this time, the number of rinderpest outbreaks had dropped substantially. As it became clear that rinderpest was spreading once again throughout Africa, OAU/IBAR expressed its concern for the need to renew control efforts. After wide-ranging consultations between national governments and donors, especially the European Communities, the Pan-African Rinderpest Campaign (PARC) was officially launched as a continent-wide control campaign. The Pan-African Rinderpest Campaign (PARC) was financed from 1986 by the European Union, principally through Regional and National Programmes of the European Development Fund (EDF). It consisted of two parts: one part supported the Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources (1BAR) of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU ), which was responsible for the co-ordination of the project; the other part was a collection of programmes at a national level which were negotiated on a case by case basis with individual countries. In total, 35 countries from West, Central and East Africa were involved in the PARC programme under various funding agreements. The aim of the programme was to : (D control and ultimately eradicate rinderpest from the continent ; (ii) revitalize and restructure livestock services, through dialogue with national governments, to make them self-sustaining ;and (iii) provide appropriate improvments to husbandry methods. By 1999, more than 12 years after PARC started, 465.5 million doses of rinderpest vaccine had been used and no rinderpest has been reported in West and Central Africa for more than ten years. The number of countries officially known to harbour rinderpest or to be suspected to have unreported cases dropped from 18 in 1986 (when PARC started) to just two in 1998. By 1999, seventeen countries had declared complete or zonal provisional freedom from rinderpest according to the OIE pathway. There was also significant progress on policy reforms and privatization of animal health services: 23 of the 35 countries have adopted cost recovery measures while in 20 countries, some form of privatization was initiated, including the use of community-based delivery systems of veterinary services. An economic impact assessment of PARC showed that rinderpest is a disease of major economic importance in the African continent.