This award recognises his particular role in creating the PPR vaccine and, in a broader perspective, all the work that the Joint FAO/IAEA Division has undertaken in this area over many years.
PPR, which was reported for the first time in 1942, is currently the most important infectious disease of sheep and goat with morbidity and mortality rates that can reach 80% in all regions where it is endemic, including Africa, the Middle and Near East, Central Asia, West Asia and China.
In February 1985, Mr Diallo started working on a project to develop a PPR homologous vaccine which was successfully tested. As studies carried out from 1989 to 1995 proved that the selected PPRV attenuated clone was a safe PPR vaccine candidate, Mr Diallo began work to manufacture the vaccine on a larger scale in 1997.
Mr Diallo’s work provided the first biochemical proof that the Rinderpest (RP) virus and the PPR virus were in fact two different and distinct viruses. He furthermore developed the first nucleic acid-based technique for their differential diagnosis in 1986.
