"Walter Plowright Walter Plowright CMG FRS FRCVS (20 July 1923 in Holbeach, Lincolnshire – 19 February 2010 in London) was an English veterinary scientist who devoted his career to the eradication of the cattle plague rinderpest. Plowright received the 1999 World Food Prize for his development of tissue culture rinderpest vaccine (TCRV), the key element in the quest to eliminate rinderpest. Rinderpest became the first animal disease to be eliminated worldwide. He was the second son of Jonathan and Mahala Plowright. He attended Moulton Grammar School which transferred to Spalding Grammar School in 1939. He graduated from the Royal Veterinary"
"On 14 October 2010, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced that field activities in the decades-long, worldwide campaign to eradicate the disease were ending, paving the way for a formal declaration in June 2011 of the global eradication of rinderpest. On 25 May 2011, the World Organisation for Animal Health announced the free status of the last eight countries not yet recognized (a total of 198 countries were now free of the disease), officially declaring the eradication of the disease. In June 2011, the United Nations FAO confirmed the disease was eradicated, making rinderpest only the second"
"global eradication program for the disease, announced in November 2009 that it expected the disease to be eradicated within 18 months. In October 2010, the FAO announced it was confident the disease has been eradicated. The agency said that ""[a]s of mid 2010, FAO is confident that the rinderpest virus has been eliminated from Europe, Asia, Middle East, Arabian Peninsula, and Africa,"" which were the locations where the virus had been last reported. Eradication was confirmed by the World Organization for Animal Health on 25 May 2011. On 28 June 2011, FAO and its members countries officially recognized global freedom"
"country until 1953. In the 1980s, outbreaks in Tanzania and Kenya were controlled by the use of 26 million doses of vaccine, and a recurrence of the disease in 1997 was suppressed by an intensive vaccination campaign. By the end of the century rinderpest had been eradicated from most countries. A few pockets of infection remained in Ethiopia and Sudan, and in 1994 the Global Rinderpest Eradication Programme was launched by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) with the aim of global eradication by 2010. In May 2011, the FAO and the World Organisation for Animal Health announced that ""rinderpest"
"the main organizations in Africa, Asia and Europe, and without the continuous support of donors and international institutions"", FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf commented. The rinderpest eradication effort is estimated to have cost $5 billion. Stocks of the rinderpest virus are still maintained by highly specialized laboratories. In 2015, FAO launched a campaign calling for the destruction or sequestering of the remaining stocks of rinderpest virus in laboratories in 24 different countries, citing risks of inadvertent or malicious release. Rinderpest was one of more than a dozen agents the United States researched as potential biological weapons before terminating its biological weapons"
"saved affected farmers 58 million net Euro. The last confirmed case of rinderpest was reported in Kenya in 2001. Since then, while no cases have been confirmed, the disease is believed to have been present in parts of Somalia past that date. The final vaccinations were administered in 2006, and the last surveillance operations took place in 2009, failing to find any evidence of the disease. In 2008, scientists involved in rinderpest eradication efforts believed a good chance existed that rinderpest would join smallpox as officially ""wiped off the face of the planet"". The FAO, which had been co-ordinating the"
"among the Nuer. Dr Walter Plowright was awarded the World Food Prize in 1999 for developing a vaccine against rinderpest. Development work on the Plowright vaccine for the RBOK strain of the rinderpest virus lasted from about 1956 to 1962. In 1999, the FAO predicted that with vaccination, rinderpest would be eradicated by 2010. Widespread eradication efforts took place as soon as the early 1900s; in 1924, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) was formed in response to rinderpest. Until the mid-1900s, eradication efforts largely took place on an individual country basis, using vaccination campaigns. In 1950, the Inter-African"
"resources for the benefit of present and future generations."" The FAO creates and shares critical information about food, agriculture and natural resources by identifying and working with different partners with established expertise and facilitating connections. The FAO has a role in animal health. High-impact animal diseases such as foot-and-mouth disease or African swine fevers may not directly affect human health, but they do affect food and nutrition security and livestock production and trade. A recent successful example has been the global eradication of rinderpest in 2011. The FAO has animal health programs to establish best practices to prevent and control"
"the implementation of this global plan. It is considered feasible to eradicate ovine rinderpest in 15 years. Ovine rinderpest Ovine rinderpest, also commonly known as peste des petits ruminants (PPR), is a contagious disease primarily affecting goats and sheep; however, camels and wild small ruminants can also be affected. PPR is currently present in North, Central, West and East Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. It is caused by ""small ruminants morbillivirus"" in the genus ""Morbillivirus,"" and is closely related to, among others,"" rinderpest morbillivirus, measles morbillivirus"", and ""canine morbillivirus"" (previously known as canine distemper virus). The disease is"
"centuries, the WHO certified the global eradication of smallpox in December 1979. Smallpox is one of two infectious diseases to have been eradicated, the other being rinderpest, which was declared eradicated in 2011. It has been suggested that smallpox was a major component of the Plague of Athens that occurred in 430 BCE, during the Peloponnesian Wars, and was described by Thucydides. Galen's description of the Antonine Plague, which swept through the Roman Empire in 165–180, indicates that it was probably caused by smallpox. Returning soldiers brought the disease home with them to Syria and Italy, where it raged for"
"against Smallpox finally eradicated the disease in the 1970s, and Rinderpest was wiped out in 2011. Eradication of polio is underway. Tissue culture is important for development of vaccines. Though the early success of antiviral vaccines and antibacterial drugs, antiviral drugs were not introduced until the 1970s. Through the WHO, the international community has developed a response protocol against epidemics, displayed during the SARS epidemic in 2003, the Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 from 2004, the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa and onwards. As infectious diseases have become less lethal, and the most common causes of death in developed"
"focused on reducing the population of wild and stray animals, controls and compulsory quarantine on animals entering the country, and vaccination of pets and wild animals. Many island nations, including Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Malta, and the United Kingdom, managed to eliminate rabies during the twentieth century, and more recently much of continental Europe has been declared rabies-free. As far as animal diseases are concerned, now that rinderpest has been stamped out, many experts believe peste des petits ruminants (PPR) is the next disease amenable to global eradication. Also known as goat plague or ovine rinderpest, PPR is a highly contagious"
"influenza, swine fever and bluetongue of sheep. Viral diseases of livestock can be devastating both to farmers and the wider community, as the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK in 2001 showed. First appearing in East Africa in 1891, rinderpest, a disease of cattle, spread rapidly across Africa. By 1892, 95 per cent of the cattle in East Africa had died. This resulted in a famine that devastated the farmers and nomadic people, some of whom were entirely dependent on their cattle. Two thirds of the population of Maasai people died. The situation was made worse by epidemics of"
"declared to be officially over by the World Health Organization on August 10, 2010. When first ordering the pig cull, the Egyptian government asserted that it was a precaution to forestall national fears of the imminent pandemic. Later, after the pig cull, the government stated that its decision to order the pig cull was directly affected by the global breakout of H5N1 virus, more commonly known as bird flu, several years earlier and a fear that the two strains of viruses could possibly combine to form a more lethal virus. Later, the Egyptian government openly stated that the pig cull"
"Ovine rinderpest Ovine rinderpest, also commonly known as peste des petits ruminants (PPR), is a contagious disease primarily affecting goats and sheep; however, camels and wild small ruminants can also be affected. PPR is currently present in North, Central, West and East Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. It is caused by ""small ruminants morbillivirus"" in the genus ""Morbillivirus,"" and is closely related to, among others,"" rinderpest morbillivirus, measles morbillivirus"", and ""canine morbillivirus"" (previously known as canine distemper virus). The disease is highly contagious, and can have a 80–100% mortality rate in acute cases in an epidemic setting. This"
"viral disease of goats and sheep characterized by fever, painful sores in the mouth, tongue and feet, diarrhea, pneumonia and death, especially in young animals. It is caused by a virus of the genus ""Morbillivirus"" that is related to rinderpest, measles and canine distemper. Eradication of infectious diseases Eradication is the reduction of an infectious disease's prevalence in the global host population to zero. It is sometimes confused with elimination, which describes either the reduction of an infectious disease's prevalence in a regional population to zero, or the reduction of the global prevalence to a negligible amount. Further confusion arises"
"5 circulating vaccine-derived cases, but increased in 2017 to 22 wild cases and 91 circulating vaccine-derived cases. Polio is one of only two diseases currently the subject of a global eradication program, the other being Guinea worm disease. So far, the only diseases completely eradicated by humankind are smallpox, declared so, in 1980, and rinderpest, likewise, in 2011. A number of eradication milestones have already been reached, and several regions of the world have been certified polio-free. A concern is the presence of circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses. The oral polio vaccine is not perfect: while the genetic characteristics are carefully balanced"
"Changes in climate will affect livestock and food production in many ways. In Africa, different regions are predicted to experience different changes in weather patterns. For example, parts of Madagascar and Mozambique are predicted to have a drier than average rainy season, while just north in parts of central Africa, a wetter December–January season is expected. Some major disease threats that livestock currently face include, rinderpest, foot and mouth disease, and Peste des petits ruminants (PPR), also known as sheep and goat plague. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has taken initiative and published two global"
"(WHO), which focuses on international health issues and disease eradication, is another of the UN's largest agencies. In 1980, the agency announced that the eradication of smallpox had been completed. In subsequent decades, WHO largely eradicated polio, river blindness, and leprosy. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), begun in 1996, co-ordinates the organization's response to the AIDS epidemic. The UN Population Fund, which also dedicates part of its resources to combating HIV, is the world's largest source of funding for reproductive health and family planning services. Along with the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, the UN"
"In 2008, the FAO organized a conference to ""discuss the potential for developing insects in the Asia and Pacific region."". According to Durst, FAO efforts in entomophagy will focus on regions in which entomophagy has been historically accepted but has recently experienced a decline in popularity. In 2011, the European Commission issued a request for reports on the current use of insects as food, with the promise that reports from each European Union member state would serve to inform legislative proposals for the new process for insect foods. According to NPR, the European Union is investing more than 4 million"
"the leaf sheath and causing longitudinal yellowish-white patches as a result of feeding. Then it invades the stem of the rice plant and stays in the pith to feed on the inner surface of the stem wall. These are not externally visual as symptoms. Severe feeding causes a deep circular cut through the parenchyma tissue showing deadhearts at the vegetative stages and whiteheads at the reproductive stages. Due to heavy damage to rice throughout the world, many controlling measures are underway. Chemical, physical, and biological controls and many traditional methods are used to control the pest at any stage of"
"poliomyelitis, yaws, dracunculiasis, and malaria. Five more infectious diseases have been identified as potentially eradicable with current technology by the Carter Center International Task Force for Disease Eradication—measles, mumps, rubella, lymphatic filariasis and cysticercosis. So far, two diseases have been successfully eradicated—one specifically affecting humans (smallpox), and one affecting a wide range of ruminants (rinderpest). Smallpox was the first disease, and so far the only infectious disease of humans, to be eradicated by deliberate intervention. It became the first disease for which there was an effective vaccine in 1798 when Edward Jenner showed the protective effect of inoculation (vaccination) of"
"smallpox that followed in the wake of the famine. In the early years of the 20th century rinderpest was common in Asia and parts of Europe. The prevalence of the disease was steadily reduced during the century by control measures that included vaccination. By 1908 Europe was free from the disease. Outbreaks did occur following the Second World War, but these were quickly controlled. The prevalence of the disease increased in Asia, and in 1957 Thailand had to appeal for aid because so many buffaloes had died that the paddy fields could not be prepared for rice growing. Russia west"
"herbivorous animals. They feed on leaves, flowers, fruits and shoots of woody plants such as ""Acacia"". The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the body that administers the world’s official endangered species list, announced in 2016 that it was moving the giraffe from a species of Least Concern to Vulnerable status in its Red List of Threatened Species report. That means the animal faces extinction in the wild in the medium-term future if nothing is done to minimize the threats to its life or habitat. The South African giraffes are not very common in captivity. As of 2010, there"
"than doubled. But it left farmers believing more is better—whether it's seed, fertilizer, or pesticides. The brown planthopper, ""Nilaparvata lugens"", the farmers' main target, has become increasingly resistant. Since 2008, outbreaks have devastated rice harvests throughout Asia, but not in the Mekong Delta. Reduced spraying allowed natural predators to neutralize planthoppers in Vietnam. In 2010 and 2011, massive planthopper outbreaks hit 400,000 hectares of Thai rice fields, causing losses of about $64 million. The Thai government is now pushing the ""no spray in the first 40 days"" approach. By contrast early spraying kills frogs, spiders, wasps and dragonflies that prey"
"to keep the insect in check. According to the FAO report, the infestation threatens 60% of the country's rice crop, as well as livestock pastures. Rice is a staple crop in Madagascar, a nation where a large percentage of the population lives in famine conditions. In the southwestern region of Madagascar, where the locusts are the worst, 80% of the population lives in poverty. The FAO plan calls for large-scale aerial operations to spray pesticides over 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of land from 2013 to 2014. According to the national Locust Control Centre, 100,000 out of 130,000 hectares"
"in Asia was estimated to be enough to feed 200 million people. Most of the damage worldwide is caused by a relatively small number of species, chiefly rats and mice. In Indonesia and Tanzania, rodents reduce crop yields by around fifteen percent, while in some instances in South America losses have reached ninety percent. Across Africa, rodents including ""Mastomys"" and ""Arvicanthis"" damage cereals, groundnuts, vegetables and cacao. In Asia, rats, mice and species such as ""Microtus brandti"", ""Meriones unguiculatus"" and ""Eospalax baileyi"" damage crops of rice, sorghum, tubers, vegetables and nuts. In Europe, as well as rats and mice, species"
"in the Vietnam war (cf. Agent Orange) and Eelam War in Sri Lanka. Biological warfare can also specifically target plants to destroy crops or defoliate vegetation. The United States and Britain discovered plant growth regulators (i.e., herbicides) during the Second World War, and initiated a herbicidal warfare program that was eventually used in Malaya and Vietnam in counterinsurgency operations. In 1980s Soviet Ministry of Agriculture had successfully developed variants of foot-and-mouth disease, and rinderpest against cows, African swine fever for pigs, and psittacosis to kill chicken. These agents were prepared to spray them down from tanks attached to airplanes over"
"has been rolled out in 48, and elimination of transmission reportedly achieved in 21. Five out of six WHO regions have goals to eliminate measles, and at the 63rd World Health Assembly in May 2010, delegates agreed to move towards eventual eradication, although no specific global target date has yet been agreed. The Americas set a goal in 1994 to eliminate measles and rubella transmission by 2000, and successfully achieved regional measles elimination in 2002, although there have been occasional small outbreaks from imported cases since then. Europe had set a goal to eliminate measles transmission by 2010, but were"
"Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to issue a call for increased global surveillance. Japan veterinary authorities confirmed an outbreak of type O FMD virus, currently more common in Asian countries where FMD is endemic. South Korea was hit by the rarer type A FMD in January, and then suffered type O infection in April. The most serious case of foot-and-mouth outbreak in South Korea's history started in November 2010 in pig farms in Andong city of Gyeongsangbuk-do, and has since spread in the country rapidly. More than 100 cases of the disease have been confirmed in the country so far,"
"the integrity of biodiversity, to global food webs, and to human health. At least 80% of our world's crop species require pollination to set seed. An estimated one out of every three bites of food comes to us through the work of animal pollinators. The quality of pollinator service has declined over time and this had led to concerns that pollination will be less resistant to extinction in the future. In recent times, environmental groups have put pressure on the Environmental Protection Agency to ban neonicotinoids, a type of insecticide. In May 2015, the Obama Administration released a strategy called"
"20% of the population is affected, treating everyone at regular intervals is recommended. Reoccurring infections are common. There is no vaccine. Treatments recommended by the World Health Organization are the medications albendazole, mebendazole, levamisole, or pyrantel pamoate. Other effective agents include tribendimidine and nitazoxanide. About 0.8 to 1.2 billion people globally have ascariasis, with the most heavily affected populations being in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia. This makes ascariasis the most common form of soil-transmitted helminthiasis. As of 2010 it caused about 2,700 deaths a year, down from 3,400 in 1990. Another type of ""Ascaris"" infects pigs. Ascariasis is"
"Food riots have recently taken place in many countries across the world. An epidemic of stem rust on wheat caused by race Ug99 is currently spreading across Africa and into Asia and is causing major concern. A virulent wheat disease could destroy most of the world's main wheat crops, leaving millions to starve. The fungus has spread from Africa to Iran, and may already be in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Food security will become more difficult to achieve as resources run out. Resources in danger of becoming depleted include oil, phosphorus, grain, fish, and water. The British scientist John Beddington predicted"