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Rift Valley fever virus is a mosquito-borne pathogen that causes widespread febrile illness and mortality in domestic animals such as sheep, cattle and goats as well as humans (Gaff, 2007). Rift Valley fever virus was first described in peer-reviewed research in 1930 (Daubney, 1931) and was generally considered a disease primarily of sub-Saharan and southern Africa (Gaff, 2007). Then 1977, the disease moved outside of sub-Saharan and southern Africa with an outbreak occurring in Egypt; since then, outbreaks have occurred in Saudi Arabia and Yemen proving it to be a virus able to invade ecologically diverse regions (Gaff, 2007).
Over the past few decades, significant changes in the distribution and intensity of Rift Valley fever (RVF) have been recorded (WHO, 2007). Since the isolation of the virus in 1931 in the Rift Valley in Kenya, it has been held responsible for several epizootics in small ruminants, causing abortions and stillborns in the ovine species in Eastern and Southern Africa (Gerdes, 2004). Epizootics first occurred in regions of high altitude such as South Africa in 1951 (which resulted in the death of an estimated 100,000 sheep), Zimbabwe in 1958, Nigeria in 1958, and Chad and Cameroon in 1967 (WHO, 2007). Until the 1970s human infection remained low, and the agent mostly affected breeders in contact with affected or dead animals. In 1973, after the first source of infection appeared in the White Nile in Sudan, a human epidemic soon began in South Africa with the first recognized human deaths (Peters, 1994). Human outbreaks then occurred in Egypt in 1977 causing 598 human deaths (Gerdes, 2004), in 1987 causing 200 human deaths, and in Kenya and Somalia in 1997 causing 478 human deaths (CDC, 1998). In 2000, cases of RVF were discovered in Saudi Arabia and Yemen marking the spread of the disease outside of Africa and the Rift Valley (Jupp, 2002). By November 2000, over 500 cases of serious RVF were discovered in Saudi Arabia, with 87 deaths. In Yemen, between August and November 2000, there were over 1,000 suspected occurrences of the disease among humans. The result of the outbreak in Yemen was 121 deaths. Since 2000, outbreaks have occurred in Kenya and Somalia (2006), Tanzania and Sudan (2007) and Madagascar and South Africa (2008).