ViroBlogy

I have written previously about the Rinderpest virus eradication campaign – and now it appears as though the final nail has in fact been hammered into the coffin’s lid while I wasn’t looking.  I thank my son Steven for noticing!

It was officially announced on 26th June, in Rome – the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) – that “…for only the second time in history, a disease has been wiped off the face of the earth”.

From a New York Times article:

The long but little-known campaign to conquer rinderpest is a tribute to the skill and bravery of “big animal” veterinarians, who fought the disease in remote and sometimes war-torn areas — across arid stretches of Africa bigger than Europe, in the Arabian desert and on the Mongolian steppes.

…
The victory is also proof that the conquest of smallpox was not just an unrepeatable fluke, a golden medical moment that will never be seen again. Since it was declared eradicated in 1980, several other diseases — like polio, Guinea worm, river blindness, elephantiasis, measles and iodine deficiency — have frustrated intensive, costly efforts to do the same to them. The eradication of rinderpest shows what can be done when field commanders combine scientific advances and new tactics.

… The modern eradication campaign began in 1945, when the Food and Agriculture Organization was founded. But it became feasible only as vaccines improved. An 1893 version made from the bile of convalescent animals was replaced by vaccines grown in goats and rabbits and finally in laboratory cell lines; a heat-stable version was developed in the 1980s.

The interesting thing about Rinderpest virus is that it is probably a consequence of human’s development of agriculture and especially the keeping of livestock, that got it into animals in the first place: it is closely enough related to measles virus that it probably only diverged from it some time around CE 1000.

So it’s not just us that get animal viruses – our pets and our livestock can get them from us, too.

But it’s now time to concentrate on the next two: polioviruses and measles.  Vaccinate, brothers and sisters, vaccinate!!

Tags: cattle plague, measles, morbillivirus, rinderpest, rinderpest eradication, vaccination, vaccine

This entry was posted on 3 August, 2011 at 11:36 and is filed under Evolution, General Virology, Viruses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.