SYMHC Classics: The End of Rinderpest

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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
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.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
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

(00:43):
with pandemic.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
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

(01:08):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
So enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
Wilson and I'm Holly Fryan.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
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

(02:04):
dire crisis all the time on this show.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
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

(02:28):
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

(02:48):
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

(03:09):
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

(03:32):
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

(03:53):
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

(04:16):
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.

(04:37):
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

(05:01):
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,

(05:22):
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,

(05:43):
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

(06:04):
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

(06:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
It could last a.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
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

(07:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
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

(07:59):
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

(08:20):
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

(08:42):
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

(09:04):
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

(09:26):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:47):
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

(10:08):
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,

(10:31):
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

(10:53):
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

(11:16):
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

(11:37):
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

(12:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
Throughout all of.

Speaker 2 (12:23):
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

(12:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:59):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
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.

(13:57):
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.

(14:20):
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.

(14:43):
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,

(15:03):
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

(15:24):
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

(15:47):
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

(16:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
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

(16:48):
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

(17:09):
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,

(17:33):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
This was during the.

Speaker 2 (17:48):
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.

(18:12):
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

(18:35):
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

(18:56):
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

(19:18):
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

(19:39):
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

(20:00):
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,

(20:26):
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

(20:47):
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

(21:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
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

(21:47):
both domestic and wild animals died, predators lost access to
their regular prey and started attacking people.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
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.

(22:15):
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

(22:38):
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

(23:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (23:21):
We're going to get to how the disease was eventually
eradicated after we take another quick sponsor break.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
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

(23:58):
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

(24:18):
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.

(24:43):
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

(25:05):
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

(25:28):
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

(25:50):
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

(26:12):
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

(26:37):
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

(27:01):
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

(27:21):
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

(27:44):
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.

(28:07):
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

(28:28):
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

(28:51):
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

(29:11):
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

(29:35):
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

(29:57):
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,

(30:19):
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

(30:40):
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

(31:02):
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

(31:25):
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

(31:47):
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,

(32:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (32:32):
This was cheap.

Speaker 2 (32:34):
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

(32:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
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

(33:32):
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,

(33:55):
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

(34:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:39):
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

(35:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
Now.

Speaker 2 (35:10):
Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can find us all over social media at missed Dhistory,
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Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a

(35:32):
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