Rinderpest
Aluna is 12 years old, and has been helping out on her family farm in Kenya for as long as she can remember. Her family owns a herd of cows, which provide meat and dairy products that are sold around the country. In order for her family to succeed, they need to maintain a herd that is healthy and productive. While Aluna helps with feeding the cows, her father regularly inspects each one to make sure they are healthy and free of any parasites or infections such as East Coast Fever, trypanosomosis and ticks. Although Aluna’s father works with a veterinarian to make regular check-ups on the cattle, it is important that the animals are also vaccinated against diseases – some of which could be capable of killing not only the animal, but the entire herd, as well as those of his neighbours. One of history’s most notorious examples of a devastating animal disease is Rinderpest.
Rinderpest is an infectious, viral disease that affects animals like cattle and other cloven-hoofed animals. Its name, taken from German, means ‘cattle-plague’ and it has been a recorded threat to farmers for over 3,000 years. The mortality rate during outbreaks was devastating, often wiping out nearly the entire infected population. Disease symptoms include fever, nasal and eye discharge, and loss of appetite. While the disease does not affect humans directly (though the virus causing it is closely related to the human measles virus), history is full of examples of instances where people were severely affected when the disease wiped out the vast majority of a country’s cattle, resulting in widespread suffering, starvation and poverty.
In a World without Veterinary Medicines, diseases like rinderpest would run rampant, severely limiting the size and production of cattle and dairy farms. Aluna and her family would be particularly at risk, as warm climates allow diseases to proliferate quickly. Globally, the damage wrought by unchecked diseases would result in widespread starvation, as well as increasing the prevalence of diseases which could directly infect humans.
Luckily for Aluna and her family, this is not the case – and it will not be the case for her children either! Through an unprecedented collaborative effort between governments, scientists, and veterinarians for a widespread vaccination programme coordinated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the OIE, rinderpest was officially declared eliminated in the world in June 2011. Rinderpest is only the second disease ever to be given this status after the eradication of the Smallpox disease in humans in 1980.
