June 28, 2011

Rinderpest

FAO Conference declares global freedom from rinderpest

The resolution that declared eradication also warned governments that live virus still sat in laboratories — and urged them to maintain contingency plans for a disease no longer circulating in nature.

28 June 2011, in Rome

At its 37th session in Rome on 28 June 2011, the FAO Conference adopted Resolution 4/2011, declaring that the world had achieved freedom from rinderpest in its natural setting. Rinderpest became the first animal disease eradicated and only the second infectious disease after human smallpox.

The declaration came ten years after the last identified case, in Kenya in 2001, because all 198 countries and territories with susceptible animals first had to demonstrate freedom through surveillance and testing.

What the committee reviewed

The Joint FAO/OIE Committee on Global Rinderpest Eradication, chaired by William Taylor, worked through country-status dossiers, surveillance and diagnostic evidence, and concluded that rinderpest had ceased to circulate outside laboratories.

The World Organisation for Animal Health had already adopted its own eradication resolution in May 2011. The two declarations were complementary rather than a single simultaneous announcement.

Eradicated in nature, not in freezers

The resolution urged member states to maintain surveillance and contingency plans, and to destroy rinderpest-virus material or secure it in approved high-containment storage. Eradication here means the virus no longer circulates in animals in nature, not that every laboratory sample was destroyed.

It also called on FAO to maintain worldwide freedom from rinderpest and to apply the lessons of the eradication to other diseases affecting food security and public health.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 2 audit passes, 1 issue open

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