CBPP: The silent lung disease decimating Kenya's cattle

A herd of cattle grazes on open land outside Kasarani Stadium in Nairobi on August 1, 2026. [Maryann Muganda, Standard]

For pastoralist communities across Kenya, cattle are more than livestock; they are a source of food, income, cultural identity, and economic security.

But this livelihood is under constant threat from a disease that has been quietly circulating in these herds for generations, and continues to erode that wealth, often without farmers even realising what is killing their animals.

Contagious Bovine Pleuropneumonia, commonly known as CBPP, is a highly infectious bacterial disease that attacks the lungs of cattle. According to Dr James Akoko, an epidemiologist with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the name itself tells the story of how the disease behaves.

"Contagious bovine, then pleuro, pneumonia, pneumonia is referring to the lungs," Dr Akoko explains. "So mainly the disease tends to localise in the lungs and cause a pneumonia-like presentation. Some people call it cattle pneumonia."

The disease spreads through the air. When an infected animal coughs or sneezes, it releases droplets carrying the bacterium, Mycoplasma mycoides, into the environment.

Healthy animals grazing or drinking nearby breathe it in and become infected themselves. Sheep and goats can pick up the pathogen too, Dr Akoko notes, but they do not fall sick from it; a related but distinct strain of the bacterium affects small ruminants, leaving cattle as the disease's primary victim.

The World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) further explains that infected animals typically develop fever, persistent coughing, nasal discharge, and laboured or rapid breathing.

If left uncontrolled, CBPP can spread rapidly through herds, with mortality rates reaching up to 50 per cent during severe outbreaks, making it one of the most important transboundary animal diseases in sub-Saharan Africa and a major threat to food security, rural livelihoods, and regional livestock trade.

According to the 2026 Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) Economic Survey, agriculture contributes just over 20 per cent of Kenya's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with livestock remaining one of the country's most important agricultural subsectors, particularly in the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASALs).

Kenya is home to more than 20 million cattle, over 30 million sheep and goats, about four million camels and more than 50 million poultry, underscoring the sector's central role in food security, household incomes and the livelihoods of millions of pastoralists and smallholder farmers.

Yet livestock production continues to face significant threats from infectious diseases. Besides CBPP, cattle in Kenya are affected by diseases such as Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD), Lumpy Skin Disease (LSD), East Coast Fever, Rift Valley Fever and brucellosis, while sheep and goats frequently battle Peste des Petits Ruminants (PPR).

According to the State Department for Livestock Development and the Kenya Climate Smart Agriculture Project (KCSAP), these diseases reduce livestock productivity through deaths, lower milk yields, poor weight gain, infertility, trade restrictions and the high cost of disease control.

The burden is particularly pronounced in northern Kenya, where prolonged drought, seasonal migration in search of pasture and water, and frequent cross-border livestock movement with Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda make disease surveillance and control increasingly difficult.

“CBPP is no longer a major concern in much of the developed world. Countries in North America, Europe and even South Africa have successfully brought the disease under control. In sub-Saharan Africa, however, it persists stubbornly, and Kenya is no exception,” says Dr Akoko.

Dr Akoko attributes this gap largely to the control methods available to wealthier nations, which rely on aggressive test-and-slaughter policies.

When a herd is suspected of carrying the disease, every animal is tested; if even one tests positive, the entire herd is eliminated, and the government compensates the farmer to restock with clean, screened animals.

"Doing that in a country like Kenya and other sub-Saharan African countries is a challenge because the government may not have the resources to compensate the farmer," he says.

The second line of defence restricting the movement of livestock across regions faces its own obstacles. Kenya does have a permit system requiring county veterinary officers to sign off before animals are moved between counties. But in border communities such as Kajiado and Narok, where Maasai families often live and graze on both sides of county lines, movement is constant and rarely reported through official channels.

"It's easily done when people are trading. But when farmers are moving their animals between counties to graze, it becomes difficult, because they do not really report that now we are moving," Dr Akoko says.

He points to the search for pasture and water, and sometimes conflict or better market prices, as the drivers of this largely untracked movement, all of which complicate disease surveillance.

A vaccine does exist and is manufactured locally by the Kenya Veterinary Vaccines Production Institute (KEVEVAPI). The vaccine, known as Contavax, was first isolated in Tanzania in 1951, from a mild strain of the bacterium known as T1/44.

It remains the most widely used CBPP vaccine on the continent, with KEVEVAPI manufacturing millions of doses a year on order from county governments.

But its protection lasts only about a year, and the vaccine is fragile: it must be kept refrigerated from the factory floor to the farm, and doses that are poorly stored along the way lose their potency, undermining farmers' confidence in vaccination altogether.

“Kenya lacks a consistent annual vaccination programme. Instead, vaccination tends to happen reactively in rings around an area once an outbreak has already been confirmed,” Dr Akoko explains.

Part of what makes CBPP so difficult to manage, Dr Akoko explains, is that it does not always look like an emergency. Unlike rabies, which produces dramatic, unmistakable symptoms that trigger swift public alarm, CBPP can behave almost silently, especially in areas where it has circulated for years.

He compares it to a long-term parasitic infection in humans that quietly saps health without an obvious single moment of crisis, or to how malaria affects communities differently depending on prior exposure.

In regions such as Marsabit, Isiolo, Turkana, Tana River, Wajir, and Mandera, long-standing hotspots for the disease, cattle have effectively adapted to CBPP's presence over generations.

Herds there may show only reduced milk production, slower growth and general poor condition rather than sudden, visible outbreaks.

The danger comes when infected animals from these adapted populations are moved into areas where cattle have never encountered the disease.

Dr Akoko recalls an outbreak in Laikipia after animals from Marsabit, appearing outwardly healthy, were introduced into a herd with no prior exposure.

The result was a rapid, severe die-off. "You might find that even the mortality rate ... in those areas where the disease has been there for a while is not many, but if the disease finds itself in central Kenya, animals will die in a very short time," he says.

The incubation period itself varies enormously from as little as two weeks to as long as six months, which means a herd can appear to lose animals in unpredictable waves over the course of a month or longer before the true cause becomes clear.

At post-mortem, the disease becomes unmistakable. Affected lungs adhere to the chest wall, and fluid pools around the lung cavity; signs experienced farmers in endemic areas learn to recognise even without formal veterinary training.

CBPP is officially classified as a transboundary and notifiable disease, meaning outbreaks must be reported to national authorities, who in turn report to the WOAH.

Because livestock move freely across national borders in the north, Dr Akoko cites vets in Turkana struggling to track animals crossing from Uganda, and herders straddling the Kenya-Tanzania border near Namanga, controlling the disease within Kenya alone is not enough.

"You will not succeed in managing it if your neighbours are not doing anything about it," he says. "You need a joint kind of effort by the countries that share the same border."

Devolution has added its own complication. With veterinary services managed at the county level, and county boundaries not always aligning with the movement patterns of pastoralist herds, coordinating vaccination campaigns and disease surveillance across jurisdictions remains difficult.

Despite the scale of the problem, Dr Akoko is candid about how little hard data exists on the true cost of the disease. CBPP is classified among Kenya's neglected tropical and zoonotic-adjacent livestock diseases, and reliable figures on annual cattle losses are hard to come by.

The deeper challenge, he argues, is infrastructural. Remote, sparsely served pastoralist areas make it difficult for veterinary officers to reach mobile herds in time, whether for diagnosis, treatment or scheduled vaccination. Communities move in response to water and pasture availability, not veterinary calendars.

What is needed, Dr Akoko suggests, is investment in simple, field-usable diagnostic tools comparable to a rapid HIV test for humans alongside stronger collaboration between farmers and trained veterinary personnel, better cross-border coordination, and a more consistent, funded vaccination programme rather than reactive ring vaccination after outbreaks have already taken hold.