Prevalence of PPR in goats

Peste des petitis ruminants (PPR) is a highly contagious disease of goats and less commonly of sheep caused by the morbillivirus genus of the Paramyxoviridae family. The disease is characterized by high fever, oculonasal discharge, ulcerative stomatitis, enteritis and pneumonia with high morbidity and mortality. The disease was first recorded in goat and sheep in Ivory Coast of West Africa (Gargadennec and Lalanne, 1942). In India the first outbreak of the disease was reported from Arasur village in Villupuram district of Tamilnadu (Shaila et al., 1989). Subsequently. outbreaks were reported from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and West Bengal (Chandra Choudhury et al., 1995). The present study deals with the prevalence of PPR in and around Kolkata during the period from July 2002 to June 2003.