Raising awareness of the farming and veterinary community to the rinderpest issues as an aid to rinderpest recognition. Strengthening laboratory diagnostic and serosurveillance capacity for rinderpest at Provincial and Federal levels. Strengthening rinderpest emergency preparedness at Provincial and Federal levels. Essentially these are all activities relating to the strengthening of veterinary services with respect to the control of transboundary animal diseases - a generic process essential to limit the impact of major diseases, to facilitate progressive control and to promote livestock trade. Conclusions Verified freedom from rinderpest for Pakistan is achievable in the near future if appropriate additional resources can be applied to the task, guided by an epidemiologically-based strategy.
Many factors suggest that now is a most opportune time for the process to be initiated.
There is a growing realisation in Pakistan of the importance of livestock to the national economy and of the fact that livestock development is an essential element of the drive towards poverty alleviation. Given application of relatively modest resources, there do not seem to be any major constraints to achieving the goal of internationally-recognised freedom from rinderpest. Rapid progress to verified freedom could then follow in many countries in Asia. The threat to Pakistan of reinvasion with rinderpest from Yemen and the two known reservoirs in Africa is vanishingly small.