What Rift Valley Fever?
We haven’t seen it here. A: Well, they are probably quite right, they probably never have seen Rift Valley Fever in their livestock. It’s got an interesting epidemiology in that it is very widely spread throughout Africa, and has been shown to occur outside Africa – in Arabia. In many of the highland areas, some of the wetter areas, there is annual circulation of this virus at a level that, if people were looking for it, it could be detected. But in the arid and semi-arid areas, such as parts of the Ogaden to southern Somalia and northeastern Kenya, the amount of Rift Valley Fever that is seen is very low indeed, and it really only emerges every 20-30 years in a type of El Nino situation, which we saw in Kenya ’63 and ’77, and of course recently in ’97-98. Q: What has been done to try and help these countries, where livestock export is, in some places, critical to the economy? A: We have been holding a series of meetings in a UNDP-supported project, the aim of which is to produce a sci
