A spreading transboundary disease
Spreading in Asia
PPR is pursuing its geographic spread in an easterly direction, giving the impression that it is colonizing territories that were freed of rinderpest following the global eradication program coordinated by the FAO and OIE.
Positive test results obtained on serum sampled from small ruminants in 2006 in Vietnam indicates that PPRV is also likely present in Southeast Asia. |  (Click on the map to enlarge it). |
Spreading in Africa
In Africa, at the end of the 1990s PPR was reported in all of the countries in the sub-Saharan region, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, where it has now become enzootic.
Over the past ten years, it has gradually spread towards East Africa (Ethiopia 2007) and headed south over the Equator to cover a belt of countries between Gabon and Somalia, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Positive serological results have been obtained in Rwanda and Burundi.
In 2012, PPR was identified for the first time in Angola and on the Comoros islands in the Indian Ocean, raising the risk of virus incursion into neighbouring Mozambique, Malawi, and Madagascar and movement towards the large game reserves of southern Africa where domestic and wild small ruminants co-exist.
Morocco was infected for the first time in 2008. After Egypt, which has been infected since at least 1989, it was the second North African country to declare the disease to the OIE.
In 2007, serological traces of the infection were observed in Tunisia, and the country declared clinical outbreaks of PPR in 2011, at the same time as Algeria.
This disease presence in countries along the southern rim of the Mediterranean has extended to Turkey since 1999. PPR remained localized in the Asian part of the country until 2004, when outbreaks in Thrace near the border to Bulgaria and Greece alerted international health organizations to the risk of its introduction into Europe.
