Rinderpest exterminated

[Thanas]

BBC

Good news at last: The Rinderpest has been eradicated.

Scientists working for the UN say that they have eradicated a virus which can be deadly to cattle.

If confirmed, rinderpest would become only the second viral disease - after smallpox - to have been eliminated by humans.

Rinderpest is prevalent in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has said that it will now suspend its efforts to track and eliminate the virus.

The FAO said it was "confident" the virus has been eradicated from those parts of the world where it is prevalent.

When the disease arrived in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century between 80% and 90% of cattle and buffalo on the continent were killed.

The eradication of the virus has been described as the biggest achievement in veterinary history and one which will save the lives and livelihoods of millions of the poorest people in the world.

Dr John Anderson from the Institute for Animal Health (IAH) at Pirbright, UK, who has been involved with the eradication programme, said: "For too long people have been involved in controlling diseases and not actually dreaming that it is possible to eradicate a disease from the world. And with Rinderpest we did."

The latest FAO progress report on the rinderpest eradication programme said: "As of mid 2010, FAO is confident that the rinderpest virus has been eliminated from Europe, Asia, Middle East, Arabian Peninsula, and Africa."

These are the regions afflicted by the viral disease in the recent past.

A formal announcement on the eradication of rinderpest is expected to be made by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) next year.

Dr Anderson and his colleagues at the IAH helped develop a simple way to test cattle to see if they had the disease.

The test, which was developed with the support of the UK's Department for International Development, was designed to be used by local people in the field and to give reliable results within minutes. It proved highly effective and the technology has been rolled out across Africa.

This was particularly important in the later stages of the programme when pockets of the virus remained in war-torn areas of southern Sudan and Somalia.

Dr Mike Baron of the IAH told BBC News that it had been too dangerous for outsiders to enter those areas.

Experts, he said, would train locals - so called 'barefoot vets' - to recognise the disease and administer vaccines. They would work with nomadic tribesmen in the regions and vaccinate herds "on the move".

Rinderpest is one of the most lethal cattle diseases known to science. Typically, seven out of 10 cattle infected with the disease would die. But in the 1960s, veterinary scientist Walter Plowright developed a workable vaccine, allowing the disease to be brought under control.

But to begin with there was little to no co-ordination. Individual countries and groups of countries would attempt to vaccinate cattle, suppressing the disease for a while. But it would then re-appear.

Progress was only made once large unified projects were established to tackle the disease.

"It's an enormously important achievement because it highlights what can be done by people working together," Dr Baron told BBC News.

"It has also taken a disease which has been a huge threat to the livelihood of people and removed it."

Let's hear it for science.

[HarrionGreyjoy]

"who cares it's only a hideously lethal cow plague"

Seriously, that's pretty damn cool. (I kinda thought we'd gotten polio too, but evidently we forgot to give a shit about India. Whoops.)

[Broomstick]

Efforts to wipe out polio have been hindered by disinformation campaigns in Nigeria as well.

Another disease on the brink is guinea worm. An interesting thing about guinea worm - it may have been the original of the snakes on the medical caduceus.

Yay science indeed.

[Molyneux]

Hot damn! That's two down, hopefully, and many more to go. I'm hoping on polio to be the next, though the anti-vaccination assholes are probably screwing that one up already, as Broomstick mentioned.

[open_sketchbook]

Hooray! Lets do polio next, and then try our damnest to get malaria.

Another benefit to getting rid of viruses is if it all goes tits up and we get knocked back to the stone age by a big rock or nuclear exchange, it's one less thing to worry about for rebuilding civiliization.

[Lord of the Abyss]

It's my understanding that polio is also a hard virus to truly exterminate because (unlike, say, smallpox) polio can survive for a long time outside of a host. Still, it's worth trying.

And yay for a triumph of medical science! Sometimes it seems like the only news is bad news.

[Shroom Man 777]

It would be hilarious for the anti-vaccine crowd to screech at this because vaccines would cause... autistic cows!

But this is good news. I mean, man, actually eliminating diseases in an active-aggressive manner. That is pretty damn awesome. One of the unsung achievements of humanity.

[CJvR]

Praise GOD for sending us a cure for the virus, which he also sent...

It's my understanding that polio is also a hard virus to truly exterminate because (unlike, say, smallpox) polio can survive for a long time outside of a host. Still, it's worth trying.

IIRC they were close to exterminating Polio when a gang of stinking Mullahs sold the locals a conspiracy theory that the vaccine was a white plot to make them sterile, so now the damn thing is spreading again.

[Broomstick]

It's my understanding that polio is also a hard virus to truly exterminate because (unlike, say, smallpox) polio can survive for a long time outside of a host. Still, it's worth trying.

Two years, if I recall correctly. It can also infect chimps and maybe gorillas, too, so there may need to be some animal vaccination work as well.

[Rogue 9]

The FAO said it was "confident" the virus has been eradicated from those parts of the world where it is prevalent.

I'm sorry, I know it's not the intent of the article, but using the present tense (saying the virus is prevalent) in an article about its extermination just sounds hilariously idiotic. Especially the quoted sentence. "We're confident that this virus that is currently running rampant doesn't exist."

[Broomstick]

That's because journalists are not actually required to have a command of the English language or the ability to be logical.