First appearing in East Africa in 1891, rinderpest, a disease of cattle, spread rapidly across Africa. By 1892, 95 per cent of the cattle in East Africa had died. This resulted in a famine that devastated the farmers and nomadic people, some of whom were entirely dependent on their cattle. Two thirds of the population of Maasai people died. The situation was made worse by epidemics of smallpox that followed in the wake of the famine. In the early years of the 20th century rinderpest was common in Asia and parts of Europe. The prevalence of the disease was steadily reduced during the century by control measures that included vaccination. By 1908 Europe was free from the disease. Outbreaks did occur following the Second World War, but these were quickly controlled. The prevalence of the disease increased in Asia, and in 1957 Thailand had to appeal for aid because so many buffaloes had died that the paddy fields could not be prepared for rice growing. Russia west of the Ural Mountains remained free from the disease - Lenin approved several laws on the control of the disease - but cattle in eastern Russia were constantly infected with rinderpest that originated in Mongolia and China where the prevalence remained high. India controlled the spread of the disease, which had retained a foothold in the southern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, throughout the 20th century, and had eradicated the disease by 1995. Africa suffered two major panzootics in the 1920s and 1980s. There was a severe outbreak in Somalia in 1928 and the disease was widespread in the country until 1953. In the 1980s, outbreaks in Tanzania and Kenya were controlled by the use of 26 million doses of vaccine, and a recurrence of the disease in 1997 was suppressed by an intensive vaccination campaign. By the end of the century rinderpest had been eradicated from most countries. A few pockets of infection remained in Ethiopia and Sudan, and in 1994 the Global Rinderpest Eradication Programme was launched by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) with the aim of global eradication by 2010. In May 2011, the FAO and the World Organisation for Animal Health announced that rinderpest as a freely circulating viral disease has been eliminated from the world.