This 2020 episode examines how, though rinderpest was declared eradicated fairly recently, rinderpest's history goes way back. Eradicating the disease took a coordinated, international effort.
Happy Saturday.
Since render pest came up in our recent episode on measles, we have our episode on the eradication of render pest is Today's Saturday Classic. This, of course, was recorded before the research we talked about in the measles episode, which concluded that measles may have diverged from render pest as long as twenty six hundred years ago.
This episode also came out on April eighth of twenty twenty, so just a few weeks into the COVID nineteen pandemic, during the period of stay at home orders and school closures and travel bands, so it already feels like kind of an early pandemic time capsule day. You can tell it's totally consumed our entire consciousness. We sound shell shocked with pandemic.
And an update on the other eradication efforts that we mention at the end of this episode. There were just thirteen cases of dracunculiasis also called guinea worm disease in twenty twenty three, and twelve confirmed cases of wild polio, but there has been an increase in cases of unvaccinated people contracting a strain of polio that mutated from the ones used in oral vaccines. Even with that in mind, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative now hopes to eradicate polio by twenty twenty six.
So enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Fryan.
Holly, you and I've been talking recently about how it feels weird to do topics that aren't somehow relevant to what's happening in the world right now, and yet also it feels like it could become really fatiguing for us, send for listeners to just be in a state of dire crisis all the time on this show.
Yeah, I am. It's making a subject selection a very weird process for me, because I am like, on the one hand, hey, wouldn't it be nice to talk about something else and have an escape episode, right? And on the other uh, it's hard to feel like you're doing justice to the time we're living in by escaping it. Yeah, it's tricky. So we're in this weird place. We're trying to pick topics that you know, folks will want to listen to because we understand people listen to our podcast for fun, but at the same time, like the pandemic is influencing our thought process, and that is bringing us to today's episode, which is another one that's inspired by this pandemic but not directly related to it. And also, if you're just like man, I cannot deal with some more pandemic stuff right now. This is also a story that has some traumatic stuff in the middle, but it's ultimately positive and hopeful because it involves the total eradication of the disease in question. Back in twenty thirteen, when we did our episode on Edward Jenner and the smallpox vaccine, we said that smallpox was the only disease to be eradicated through human activity. However, just two years before we recorded that episode, a second disease had also been declared eradicated, and that disease was render Pest. Render Pest's eradication was so recent at that point that none of our sources referenced it, Like there were all these things that just very confidently, even recently published things very confidently saying smallpox is the only thing to ever be eradicated, And at that point render Pest also just had also Colly and I obviously were both alive in twenty eleven. This was not something that really stuck with people when it was announced in twenty eleven unless they had a person or professional connection to it in some way. For the most part, so this declaration that render pest had been eradicated was less than ten years ago. That's way more recent than the history we typically talk about on the show. But render Pest's history as the disease, goes back way farther than that, obviously, and the process of eradicating the disease really illustrates how it required a very coordinated international effort to do it. Render pest is caused by a virus in the genus morbilivirus. This genus includes other viruses that you may have heard of, including human measles and canine distemper. There are morbiliviruses that can infect marine life as well, including dolphins and whales, and render pest specifically has been around for a long time, perhaps as long as ten thousand years, dating back to the first domestication of Oryx, which are a now extinct type of wild ox in southwestern Asia. Before its eradication, render pest and affected domestic animals like cattle, sheep, and goats, as well as at least forty other hoofed mammals, specifically even towed ungulates like wildebeest, antelope, deer, buffalo, and giraffe. It did not infect human beings, although that wasn't necessarily always true. Render Pest's nearest relative is human measles, and these two diseases appear to have diverged only about a thousand years ago, so it's possible that before that point there was a strain of render pest virus that could infect both humans and hoofed mammals. The name render pest comes from the German word for cattle plague. It's also been known as stepmurin Meurin being another word for pestilence, and step coming from its prevalence in the steps of Asia and southeastern Europe. It was known as Sedoka in some parts of Africa and Pushima on the Indian subcontinent, and at various points it has also been named for where affected communities thought the disease had come from. For example, in parts of seventeenth century Europe, people called it the Russian disease because it was believed to have been introduced through cattle that were traded from Russia. Render pest was mostly spread through close contact among infected animals, with the virus being present in their nasal, oral, ocular, and fecal secretions. Basically, if it made a secretion, there's probably render pest in there. Infected dung could also contaminate food and water sources and spread the disease that way. It wasn't as common for things like pasture land to become infected because the virus broke down in sunlight, so it was gone from a sunny pasture in about six hours.
It could last a.
Lot longer in more shady areas, though. In terms of how the illness progressed after being exposed, animals went through an eight to eleven day incubation period and then they would develop a fever. Early symptoms of the acute illness included watery discharges from the eyes and nose, causing the animal to look like they were crying. From there, they would develop intense diarrhea that lasted for a day or two. Animals could shed the virus for a couple of days before developing symptoms, but they shed the virus in huge amounts once they had become visibly sick.
Animals that managed to survive this diarrheal stage typically recovered and they went on to have a lifelong immunity to render past, but most of the time it just wasn't survivable. That diarrhea led to dehydration and death. A typical strain of render pest could cause a mortality rate of up to ninety percent in susceptible animals.
There were some exceptions. Some strains of the virus weren't as lethal, but they could have other effects. For example, koudoos, which are antelopes with spiral horns, could survive milder forms of render pest, but tended to develop blindness because the virus infected their eyes. The Mongol Empire's Asian gray step oxen tended to be resistant to the virus, but they were still able to spread it to other animals. Although this virus may have existed for as long as ten thousand years, its presence in recorded history isn't quite that long. Cattle plagues of various sorts are documented going back to about three thousand BCE in ancient Egypt, but a lot of those earliest descriptions don't match up with the symptoms of render past. The earliest historical accounts of what was probably render pest took place in the Roman Empire between the years three seventy six and three eighty six, and then that disease spread through the empire's war with the Goths. From there, render pest outbreaks frequently followed in the wake of war. As we noted earlier, the Mongol Empire's oxen spread the illness to less resistant animals during the Mongol invasion of Europe starting in the thirteenth century. From there, armies that used even towed ungulates as pack animals or food sources carried render pest with them, or victorious armies unknowingly took infected animals with them as spoils of war, thus spreading the disease to their own animals when they got home. Render pest also followed trading routes, both through the trade of food animals and the use of pack animals to carry other trade goods. The spread of the disease in this way really increased starting in about the seventeenth century, as long distance trade involving livestock and pack animals became more and more widespread. Even though render pest didn't directly infect humans, the disease could still cause huge loss of human life. Large render pest outbreaks could leave communities without their sources of meat or milk, without the animals that they needed to cultivate the land, without the dung that they needed to fertilize it, and without transportation to try to find other sources of food elsewhere.
In seventeen o nine, a major render pest epizootic started in Europe. An epizootic is basically an epidemic, but involving non human animals. This lasted for decades and led to the deaths of a as many as two hundred million livestock animals in Europe. It also led to a lot of people studying the disease and trying to figure out how to stop it spread. In seventeen eleven, Johann Kennold of Prussia noted that livestock that had survived render pest were resistant to later exposure. That same year, Pope Clement the eleventh appointed physician Giovanni Maria Lanchesi to study render pest and try to find some way to control it. In seventeen fifteen, Lanchesi published a treatise based on this work, which was called De Bavilla Peste. In general, Lanchiesi's infection control guidelines still hold up pretty well. He recommended restricting livestock movements, quarantining infected animals, slaughtering animals that had been exposed to reduce the spread of the disease, and burying the carcasses in lime. He also recommended a number of general sanitation procedures and meat inspections. In the seventeen teens, the practice of very elation to prevent smallpox started to be used more frequently in Europe. Variolation was common in India, China, and Africa before this point, but it became more widely known in England and other parts of Europe thanks to Lady Mary Warley Montague, whose husband had been ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Variolation involved deliberately exposing someone to smallpox, often by inserting smallpox infected material through a puncture in their skin. There is more about this in our prior episode on Edward Jenner and the smallpox Vaccine. As the practice of variolations spread in Europe, people in both England and the Netherlands started trying to come up with a similar method to do the same basic thing with render pest. They were not successful at doing this, but while doing this research, Renders and Petros vun Campen realized that calves whose mothers had survived render pest were resistant to their attempted inoculations. This is one of the first document recordings of the idea of maternal immunity. In seventeen sixty one, the world's first veterinary school was established in Lyon, France, with one of its major objectives involving teaching veterinarians Giovanni Maria Lenciesi's methods of preventing render pest. We talk about this veterinary school in our episode called a Brief History of Veterinary Medicine.
Throughout all of.
This public health practices for humans were being developed and refined in response to what people were doing with render pest in animals. Aside from the idea of slaughtering exposed animals to prevent the spread of the disease, most of the methods for controlling and epizootic and animals also applied to an epidemic in humans. This included establishing cordon senataire or sanitary barriers around infected populations. The fight against render pest also involved the first use of thermometers to try to detect fevers as part of an infection control regimen.
In spite of these advances, though, some of the world's most devastating render pest outbreaks were still to come, and we're going to talk about that after we first have a sponsor break.
Although people had made important advancements in infection control and veterinary medicine leading up to the nineteenth century, the eighteen hundred saw some really devastating render pest outbreaks. We're going to focus on just two of them in particular, but the.
First in June of eighteen sixty five, render pest was reintroduced to the island of Great Britain. It affected livestock populations all over the island, although the Highlands and Islands of Scotland were mostly spared. The most likely source of the infection was cattle that had been imported from Estonia. The British response to this outbreak was really not great. It had been more than a century since render pest had been present on the island, so there was nobody there who had firsthand knowledge or memory of what it looked like, and even though people knew that render pest was endemic in parts of continental Europe, there was this really weird sense or maybe just wishful thinking, that maybe this was some other disease instead and not render pest. The anti contagion movement that we talked about in our recent episode on maxivon Pettenkofer was connected to all of this as well, as people kind of questioned whether, like some pathogen could really be causing render pest. It wasn't until the end of July eighteen sixty five that the outbreak was officially confirmed as render pest, and orders in Council started to be issued to try to stop it spread. Those orders included ones that required people to quarantine sick animals and to cull potentially diseased livestock, but some of the orders were also relatively vague and contradictory, and they didn't have much enforcement power built into them. Farmers, cattle traders and others owned livestock resisted calls to destroy their animals, and there was really not a strong legal mechanism to address this. To add another complication, British physician Charles Murchison published a paper suggesting that necropsies of affected animals showed signs that were more similar to smallpox than render pest. The smallpox vaccine for humans had been introduced in seventeen ninety six, and the UK had made smallpax vaccination mandatory in eighteen fifty three, so people just latched onto the idea that what was happening to the cattle might really be smallpox or something similar instead of render pest, and a massive vaccination campaign got under way in September of eighteen fifty five. That same month, Queen Victoria authorized an additional prayer in which congregations of the Church of England would ask for God's mercy and that he quote, stay we pray thee this plague by Thy word of power. Tens of thousands of cattle in Britain were vaccinate for smallpox between September of eighteen sixty five and January of eighteen sixty six. So many vaccines were administered that health officials ran out of the lymph that was used to make them. Murchison and his supporters offered up various explanations for why vaccinated animals continued to get sick and die. When the real reason was that the disease that was at work was render pest, not smallpox.
Belgian doctor Lewis Vellums had also developed a method of inoculating cattle against a different disease called contagious bovine plurineumonia. This involved threading infected material through the end of the animal's tail, and in the case of plurineumonia, this made the animal immune to the disease, with the most serious side effect being potentially the loss of some or all of the animal's tail. So people try to do the same basic thing with render pest. That did not work. It just spread the disease farther. In mid February of eighteen sixty six, the Cattle Plague Commission finally announced that the smallpox vaccination effort was not working, and they recommended the infection control and quarantine procedures that had been developed back in the early seventeen hundreds. The Cattle Disease Prevention Act was passed in February eighteen sixty six and required the culling of infected herds, with some financial compensation to people who lost their livestock as a result. It was not until eighteen sixty seven that this outbreak was controlled. However, there was worse still to come. Less than twenty years later, what may have been the biggest and most destructive render pested outbreak in history started when the disease was introduced into Sub Saharan Africa for the first time.
This was during the.
Scramble for Africa, when European nations divided the African continent up among themselves, establishing and expanding their colonies there. In addition to all the political, social, and human rights issues that we have talked about in a number of other episodes on the show, this also introduced and expanded European style farming and animal husbandry methods into the African continent. The likely source of this outbreak was probably cattle that Italy had imported into Africa from the Indian subcontinent. Africa's indigenous peoples already had their own established methods of animal husbandry and veterinary care, but this was a disease African people had no prior experience with, and their established practices either weren't effective or they made the situation worse. Often, white farmers and ranchers didn't have any personal experience with it either, and some of them assumed that what was happening was a unique African illness rather than render pest, and this led some of them to try Villam's tail inoculation that we talked about a moment ago, rather than culling their exposed herds. After render pest was introduced into sub Saharan Africa, as much as ninety percent of the domestic cattle there died. The disease also spread to domestic sheep and goats, and infected wild buffalo, giraffes, wildebeests, and other animals. In general, the major source of the disease spread was domestic herd animals, spreading it to wild animals. The population density of wild animals like wildebe typically just wasn't enough to really keep the disease going. Other factors made the situation much worse, including droughts that led large numbers of animals to cluster around watering holes and warfare among African nations. Many African herders were nomadic, which both spread the illness to other animal populations and made the disease even harder to track. Plus, colonial governments tried to protect their own interests over those of local Africans. Including, for example, destroying all the African owned he herds while leaving their own herds untouched, regardless of whether either of these herds was showing signs of exposure. White farmers and ranchers living in European colonies tried to protect their herds rather than calling them, including doing things like trying to hide evidence of a possible infection. Meanwhile, the colonized African people's distrusted colonial efforts to stop the disease for obvious reasons. Basically, all the various human populations in Africa at the time were working against one another, and that allowed the disease to spread farther and then in many places, the devastation brought on by the outbreak made it easier for European powers to exploit African people and resources. The result of all this was known as the Great African render pest pan zootic, and a widespread famine followed in its wake. In many parts of Sub Saharan Africa, between half and two thirds of the human population died of starvation, disease are animal attacks. In many African nations, the entire social order was upended, both because of the massive death toll and because the cattle which had represented wealth and status in these societies had all died, the render passed panzootic and colonial authorities response to it was also one of the factors that led to the Second Matabili War in what's now Zimbabwe in eighteen ninety six.
The entire ecosystem was disrupted in many parts of the African continent. Grazing animals had kept grass under control. Without those grazing herds, grass formed thickets, which became breeding grounds for sisiflies, which caused an epidemic of African sleeping sickness. Rodents and insects like locusts and caterpillars also flourished. As both domestic and wild animals died, predators lost access to their regular prey and started attacking people.
In South Africa, the Deber's Company invited bacteriologist Robert Cooch to Kimberly to study the disease and to try to develop a vaccine. By this point, it was well known that animals that managed to recover from render pest were immune to the disease afterward, so first Coke tried to use the blood of recovered animals to make a vaccine. Although that did provide a brief immunity. That immunity eventually faded, and the method also had the potential to spread other bloodborne diseases. Eventually, Coke and veterinarian Arnold Thyler developed a method of using bile from infected animals. They got this idea from a method that farmers in the Orange Free State had developed that involved using sponges soaked in bile implanted under the skin of livestock. Coke and Thyler's method involved killing an animal that was infected with render pests and then harvesting enough bile to create an injection that could treat about twenty five healthy animals. This method was not totally fool proof, but it did seem to confer some immunity, and others in and around South Africa continued to refine the formula and the method, along with the other infection control methods that we've talked about earlier in the episode. This vaccine helped slow the spread of render pest on the African continent. However, the panzootic lasted until about eighteen ninety seven, and then smaller scale epizootics continued afterward.
We're going to get to how the disease was eventually eradicated after we take another quick sponsor break.
By the start of the twentieth century, render pest outbreaks regularly threatened livestock, wild animals, and people in various parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Many countries where render pest was not present had passed laws that banned the import of livestock or meet from the places where render pest was endemic. In some cases, countries also banned cargo ships that had carried livestock from those trees. In spite of these kinds of precautions, render pest was introduced in Brazil in nineteen twenty one and in Australia in nineteen twenty three. Although it was quickly contained in both of those places, it might have been introduced into North America at some point. If it was, it was contained so quickly that it's not really clear whether that was really what was happening or if it was something else. By this point, we knew a little more about render pest than we had in the nineteenth century. Maurice Nicole and Mustafa Adilbay had demonstrated that it was caused by a virus. In nineteen oh two, Previously, people had thought that render pest was bacterial. In nineteen twenty, render pest was accidentally reintroduced into Belgium. The most likely source for this was zebus from India that were being sent to Brazil and had passed through Belgium on the way there. From there, render pest spread to other parts of Europe that had previously been render pest free for decades, and this led to an international effort to try to radicate the disease entirely. In the nineteen twenties, J. T. Edwards developed a vaccine using a technique called serial passage. This was similar to what Louis Pest and Emil rou had done to develop a vaccine for rabies in eighteen eighty five. For Edward's render pest vaccine, he used goats, exposing one to render pest, allowing the disease to incubate, and then using that incubated virus to infect the next goat. After doing this repeatedly, he had a strain of the virus that was more adapted to goats than to cattle, and then he used that virus to vaccinate the cows. This method was fairly effective, but it did have some drawbacks. It took a lot of goats and a lot of time to cultivate a strain of the virus that would work for this purpose, and then sometimes that strain would revert back to being more lethal for the cattle. In nineteen twenty four, during a render pest outbreak in France, the Office Internacionale de Eposotes or OIE was established. It would later become the World Organization for Animal health, and it was a major part of the global effort to stop render pest. In the nineteen fifties, veterinary scientist Walter Plowright and his colleagues developed a new render pest vaccine. They used tissue cultures rather than serial passage through living goats, to create an attenuated strain of the virus. They patterned their work after research that was being done on a human measles virus vaccine. Their vaccine gave animals lifelong immunity against all known strains of render pest with just one injection. However, the vaccine had to be kept cold from the time it was made to when it was administered, and this just wasn't feasible for a large scale global vaccination campaign. That was especially true in places that were very hot, very remote, or both. In nineteen fifty four, India started its National render Pest Eradication Program, which vaccinated twenty six alien cattle every year. India soon went from seeing thousands of outbreaks a year which infected hundreds of thousands of animals, to more like three hundred outbreaks per year. So this campaign definitely helped control render pest in India, but it did not totally eradicate the disease there. People had been trying to control render pest in Africa from the time that it was introduced, but when it came to a coordinated international effort to eradicate it completely that started in nineteen sixty three. This effort was known as Joint Project fifteen or JP fifteen, and it involved twenty two different African nations, seventeen of which had ongoing render pest outbreaks. By the end of nineteen seventy nine, Sudan was the only nation involved that was still reporting cases of render pest. However, the dramatic reduction in render pest had led to a sense of complacency as well as a lack of funding, so the campaign ended without actually eradicating the disease, which then, of course resurged that happened dramatically in the nineteen eighties. To backtrack just a bit, in nineteen sixty nine, a render pest outbreak in Afghanistan spread to multiple other nations from there, including Bahrain, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and Yemen. The pattern of render past being spread through warfare continued as well, including through the Israeli and Syrian armies in the nineteen seventies and through Indian troops in Sri Lanka in nineteen seventy eight. In the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, tests were developed that detected both active render pest infections and immunity to the disease. It was also established that the antibodies passed from mother to offspring lasted for about eleven months. These discoveries made it possible to confirm whether animals were immune and to establish guidelines for how old an animals should be before it was vaccinated. International efforts to eradicate renderest continued from there. The Pan African render Pest campaign began in nineteen eighty six under the auspices of the African Union Inter African Bureau of Animal Resources and people were also refining the render pest vaccine. At this point, Tuff's University School of Veterinary Medicine and the US Department of Agriculture developed a vaccine called thermovaxin nineteen ninety two. This vaccine had a thirty day shelf life that did not require refrigeration during that time. In nineteen ninety four, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization launched its Global render Pest Eradication Program it's GRIP or g REP. From the beginning, it set a sixteen year timeline for eradicating render pest. Although most of the funding came from European nations, most of the countries where render pest outbreaks were still occurring were in Asia, Sub Saharan Africa, and the Middle East. A critical part of the GP was working with community based animal health workers. These are people who personally owned livestock and were also selected by their communities to be part of this program. They got trained in animal care program methods and vaccine administration, and then they would take that knowledge back to their own communities. This is a totally different mindset from sending in veterinarians, academics and government officials from outside the community to try to sort of impose a vaccine program. Much of this work involved figuring out which animals needed to be vaccinated to have the greatest effect, because it wasn't always possible to vaccinate every animal. For example, in Ethiopia, migratory herders moved their cattle between the lowlands and the highlands depending on the season, but there were also herds in the highlands that remained there year round. As it became clear that the migratory herds were carrying the disease to the highlands rather than contracting the disease from the highland herds, animal health workers focused their immunization efforts on eliminating the disease from the migratory population. In nineteen ninety six, the Food and Agricultural Organization identified seven regions of the world that could act as a reservoir for the virus. This included parts of Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and Eastern Africa. Eradication efforts were tightly focused in these regions that in nineteen ninety nine, the FAO intensified the program under the slogan of seek, Contain, Eliminate. After a few outbreaks were connected to the weakened form of the virus that was used in the vaccine. The FAO also set standards for when to stop vaccinating animals once immunity had been established. One by one, as nations had no new cases of render pest, they were declared render pest free. The last render pest outbreak on Earth was reported in Sudan in two thousand and one. The last vaccination programs ended in two thousand and six. Surveillance to make sure the disease didn't recur continued for the next few years until render pest was cleared globally eradicated on May twenty fifth, twenty eleven, ten years after the last outbreak. The United Nations has estimated that the total cost of eradicating render pest, including all the money spent between nineteen forty five and twenty eleven, was five billion dollars. And articles about the eradication, doctor Peter Rhader, the secretary of the FAO Global Render Pest Eradication Program, was quoted as saying, quote, at first, I thought that's quite a lot. Then I thought the last royal wedding cost eight billion dollars.
This was cheap.
To be clear, I think the previous royal wedding to this was was William and Kate. It did not cost eight billion dollars, like, even if you factor in the total cost of things like the public holidays that were around the West r Like, the super highest estimate that I've seen, including all those like intenangible's side effects, was like five billion dollars. The actual wedding cost was in the millions with an M, not the billions with a B. But this is still a great quote.
Now I'm trying to think about what an eight billion dollar wedding would look like. And also, please, don't anyone spend eight billion dollars on a wedding. That's just my own personal thought. In November of twenty eighteen, the OIE and the FAO announced a global action plan to prevent the reemergence of render pest. Basically, there are a lot of labs in the world that still have samples of the virus or old vaccine stock. The organizations have called for safe destruction of these materials or transfer to an approved render pest holding facility to prevent the risk of these viruses escaping or being released through accident or criminal activity. Even though render pest and human measles are really closely related, they have some similar traits. Measles is not anywhere close to being erratic. It has been declared eliminated in some parts of the world. That means that it is not being continuously transmitted among the population of those places anymore. But even nations where measles has been eliminated can continue to have outbreaks periodically, particularly among unvaccinated people. However, there are two other diseases that are close to eradication, dracunculiasis or guinea worm disease, with fifty four reported cases in twenty nineteen, and polio, which had ninety four reported cases in twenty nineteen, although that is a significant increase over the twenty eighteen total of thirty three cases.
So that is a story of how render pest was eradicated from the planet. Hooray it caused a lot of the devastation successful international eradication program. Yeah which for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete.
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