Rinderpest-free at last (Image: Sayyid Azim/AP/PA)

Update: The World Organisation for Animal Health declared today that rinderpest is now eradicated from the surface of the Earth. At the organisation’s 79th annual general session in Paris, France, it was officially recognised that all 198 countries and territories with rinderpest-susceptible animals in the world are free of the disease.

Original article, posted 20 October 2010

FOR only the second time, humans have eradicated a disease: the cattle plague rinderpest. The first victory was over smallpox, making this the first-ever animal disease to go.


The last major rinderpest outbreak was in Kenya in 2001, but making sure the virus wasn’t lingering undetected in war-torn Sudan and Somalia has proven difficult. Such pockets of infection allowed the virus to roar back from near-eradication in the 1980s.

A repeat was avoided this time thanks in part to simple diagnostic tests that local farmers could operate. These meant that surviving pockets of infection could be detected and wiped out, no matter how remote.

As a result, Bernard Vallat, head of the World Organisation for Animal Health, declared that he was “confident” rinderpest was gone at a scientific meeting on the disease in Rome, Italy, last week. The organisation is expected to formally announce rinderpest’s eradication at a meeting in Paris, France, next May.

The virus only infects bovines, but to people who depend on cattle, it means starvation. It plagued Europe from the late Roman Empire till the 1920s, and when it arrived in Africa in 1887, 80 per cent of the livestock died – as did much of the human population.

An effective vaccine was developed in the 1960s, and mass cattle vaccination campaigns eliminated the virus from large areas of Asia and Africa by 2000, though it persisted in remote herds until now.