Epidemiologist for the Collaborative Centres in Nairobi and N_Djamena.

Rinderpest was first introduced to the African continent in 1841 and it first appearedsouth of the Sahara in 1884, after infected cattle were imported from India. Theresulting epidemic killed over 90% of the indigenous cattle and wildlife population inSub-Saharan Africa and up to 75% of Egyptian cattle and buffaloes.During the 1960s and 1970s, the Joint Project Campaign (JP15) was initiated. Itresulted 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 droppedsubstantially. As it became clear that rinderpest was spreading once again throughoutAfrica, OAU/IBAR expressed its concern for the need to renew control efforts. Afterwide-ranging consultations between national governments and donors, especially theEuropean Communities, the Pan-African Rinderpest Campaign (PARC) was officiallylaunched as a continent-wide control campaign.The Pan-African Rinderpest Campaign (PARC) was financed from 1986 by theEuropean Union, principally through Regional and National Programmes of theEuropean Development Fund (EDF). It consisted of two parts: one part supported theInterafrican 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 acollection of programmes at a national level which were negotiated on a case by casebasis with individual countries. In total, 35 countries from West, Central and EastAfrica 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 withnational 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 rinderpestvaccine had been used and no rinderpest has been reported in West and Central Africafor more than ten years. The number of countries officially known to harbourrinderpest or to be suspected to have unreported cases dropped from 18 in 1986 (whenPARC started) to just two in 1998.By 1999, seventeen countries had declared complete or zonal provisional freedomfrom rinderpest according to the OIE pathway. There was also significant progress onpolicy reforms and privatization of animal health services: 23 of the 35 countries haveadopted cost recovery measures while in 20 countries, some form of privatization wasinitiated, including the use of community-based delivery systems of veterinaryservices. An economic impact assessment of PARC showed that rinderpest is adisease of major economic importance in the African continent.