Abstract:
Ethiopia possesses huge population of sheep and goats despite the country benefited little from it due to different factors including Peste des Petits Ruminants (PPR), highly contagious and economically important trans-boundary disease of small ruminants associated with high morbidity and mortality. Cross-sectional study involving questionnaire survey, retrospective outbreak data, seroprevalence, isolation and molecular data analysis were conducted from February 2020 to May 2021 in selected districts of Awi and Metekel zones with the objective of revealing epidemiological status, isolation and molecular detection of PPRV circulating in the area using c-ELISA and real time PCR. Of the total 714 sera samples tested, 467 (65.4%) were found positive for PPRV antibody. Significantly higher prevalence of 70.7% (236/334, P=0.007, CI=65.4-75.4) in Metekel than Awi zone (60.8%) was observed. Seroprevalence of 66.8% (243/364) in sheep and 64% (224/350) in goats with no statistical significant difference (P> 0.05) was also revealed. In this study, significantly higher seroprevalence was recorded in old animals (75.2%, OR=3.5) than adult (72.7%, OR=2.8) compared to young (52.1%) (CI=2.3-6.2, P=0.000). A prevalence of 64.9% and 54.4% was observed in female and male animals respectively (P=0.000, ꭓ2=13.18). From 42 samples examined with the PCR, 38.1%; 15 (5.7%) goat and 1 (2.4%) sheep were detected positive. The virus was also successfully isolated from VDS cell cultured samples. The questionnaire survey revealed that 89.7% (n=78) of farmers know the disease though most of them are not familiar with prevention and control measures. About 64.1% of them also indicated that PPR outbreak occurs each year. The retrospective data (2016-2021) showed a total of 632 PPR outbreaks with high morbidity and mortality rate in Benishangul Gumuz the outbreaks being common in dry season. As evidenced from the questionnaire survey, retrospective, serology and molecular detection in addition to the field observation result of this study, PPR is found to be endemic in the study area. The higher PPRV circulation, the usual free animal movement and communal grazing system in the area indicates possibility of further spread within and to other areas. Therefore, it should have get priority attention from control and eradication campaign of the country. Creating awareness to farmers, restricting animal movement and targeted vaccination is necessary to prevent spread of the disease. Further study on sequencing and characterizing the circulating virus to a lineage level is also recommended.
