Epidemiological Insights into the Occurrence of Peste des Petits Ruminants Virus (PPRV) Among Sheep, Goats and Cattle in Western Uganda

Abstract

Peste des Petits Ruminants (PPR) is a virulent trans-boundary disease caused by morbillivirus of the Paramyxoviridae family affecting East Africa. The disease is now widespread in tropical and sub-tropical countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and western and southern Asia. It affects ruminants especially goats and sheep and has continued to spread across pastoral and agro-pastoral areas of north-eastern Uganda with over 2,000,000 (25%) of the goats and sheep in this area affected. We collected serum samples from cattle, goats and sheep from Kasese and Rubirizi districts, western Uganda and subjected them to competitive ELISA. Prior to our sero-epidemiological study in 2016, PPRV was known to be limited to Karamoja pastoral area North-eastern Uganda due to the large numbers of goats and sheep in this region hence the outbreaks; and cattle were never implicated for this disease. In our 2016 investigation, we detected sero-prevalences of goats (6.65%), Sheep (5.88%) and cattle (38.1%) in a new focus of South-western Uganda. Further exploration of data from Ministry of Agriculture Animal Industry and Fisheries MAAIF, Uganda; we discovered that PPR cases have been captured by National Animal Disease Diagnostics and Epidemiology Centre (NADDEC) from different parts of the country over the years although control measures have been targeted only for Karamoja sub-region. PPR virus is distributed throughout Uganda, however, there is need to create awareness amongst the farmers and veterinary stakeholders and the need to target control measures country wide.