Posted on 12/03/2009 5:20:57 PM PST by neverdem
Rinderpest will be only the second disease to be wiped out.
Rinderpest, the world's most devastating cattle disease, will be declared eradicated within 18 months, according to world health bodies.
The effort will make it only the second disease to be wiped from the globe — the first was smallpox, eradicated in 1980.
"Rinderpest tops the list of killer diseases [in animals]," says Juan Lubroth, chief veterinary officer for the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome. It not only kills cattle and other wildlife, it also causes famines when people in developing countries lose the beasts they need to plough their fields, he adds.
Eradication of the disease would be a "massive achievement for the veterinary community", says Chris Oura, head of the Non-Vesicular Disease Reference Laboratory Group at the Institute for Animal Health in Pirbright, UK.
Rinderpest, otherwise known as cattle plague, has killed many millions of cattle and other wildlife around the world since it first spread from Asia to Europe in the herds of the invading tribes, causing outbreaks during the Roman Empire in 376-386. Since then, the disease has spread throughout Europe and on to Africa, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent. Outbreaks in Nigeria during the 1980s cost around $2 billion, according to the FAO.
The disease is caused by a virus called a morbillivirus — a group that also includes the measles virus. Clinical signs include fever, discharges from the eyes and nose, diarrhoea and dehydration and the disease kills 80-90% of infected cattle in just 7-10 days. The last outbreak in Asia was in 2000 and the last known cases of the disease were in Kenya in 2001...
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
Thanks for this article, Neverdem. This was something I didn’t know before.
small pox eradicated? really doubt that, its still out there waiting to spring back up.
Never heard of it.
Extinct in the wild.
As far as samples in various governments' labs?
Schrödinger's virus.
We won't know until we look everywhere...
Eradicated? My bet that it is laying in a reservoir somewhere in Africa and waiting to explode in those excellent managed and advanced Muslim African nations.
Beware of the unprofessional antigen presenting cells. M-CSF most likely means Macrophage-Colony Stimulating Factor, IMHO.
Thanks neverdem for the ping, and the post.
Excellent news! Rinderpest has changed the outcome of many wars in the past, most recently the Boer War, where 3/4ths of the British Cavalry horses sent to South Africa died of the disease, while the Boer horses were mostly immune.
It dates back to Roman times, and is also responsible for innumerable famines throughout Europe, Asia and Africa.
Interesting. Thanks for the ping!
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