April 8, 2020 • 35 mins
The declaration that rinderpest had been eradicated was less than 10 years, but rinderpest’s history goes back much farther than that. And the process of eradicating the disease really illustrates how it took a coordinated, international effort to do it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Holly, You
and I've been talking recently about how it feels weird
(00:22):
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 and for
listeners to just be in a state of um dire
crisis all the time on the show. Yeah, I am.
(00:42):
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.
(01:06):
So we're in this weird place. We're trying to pick
topics um that you know, folks will want to listen
to you, 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,
(01:28):
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 when we did our
episode on Edward Jenner and the smallpox vaccine, we said
(01:50):
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 pests eradication was so recent
at that point that none of our sources referenced it,
Like there were all these things that just very confidently,
(02:11):
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, Holly and I obviously
were both alive in eleven. This was not something that
really stuck with people when it was announced, inn unless
(02:31):
they had a personal 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 talked
about on the show. But render pests history as the
disease goes back way farther than that obviously, and the
process of eradicating the disease really illustrates how it required
(02:55):
a very coordinated international effort to do it. Render pests
is caused by a virus in the genus more Bila virus.
This genus includes other viruses that you may have heard of,
including human measles and canine distemper. There are more Billa
viruses that can infect marine life as well, including dolphins
and whales, and render pest specifically has been around for
(03:18):
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 past infected domestic animals like cattle, sheep,
and goats, as well as at least forty other hoofed mammals,
(03:39):
specifically even towed ungulates like wild beast, antelope, deer, buffalo,
and giraffe. It did not infect human beings, although that
wasn't necessarily always true. Render Past'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
(04:00):
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 step muran murn being another word
for pestilence, and step coming from its prevalence in the
steps of Asia and southeastern Europe. It was known as
(04:22):
Sadoca 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
(04:42):
Past 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.
(05:02):
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
(05:24):
and then they would develop a fever. Early symptoms of
the acute illness included watery discharges from the eyes and nose,
causing the animals 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
(05:45):
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 irhea led to dehydration and death. A typical strain
of render pest could cause a mortality rate of up
(06:06):
to nine and susceptible animals. There were some exceptions. Some
strains of the virus weren't as lethal, but they could
have other effects. For example, kudos, which are antelopes with
spiral horns, could survive milder forms of render pest, but
tended to develop blindness because the virus infected their eyes.
(06:26):
The Mongol Empires 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
and recorded history isn't quite that long. Cattle plagues of
various sorts are documented going back to about three thousand
(06:47):
BC e 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,
(07:08):
render pest outbreaks frequently followed in the wake of war.
As we noted earlier, the Mongol empires 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
(07:31):
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
(07:55):
more and more widespread. Even though render pest didn't directly
infect human's the disease could still cause huge loss of
human life. Large render pest outbreaks could leave communities without
their sources of meat or milk, with without the animals
that they needed to cultivate the land without the dung
that they needed to fertilize it, and without transportation to
(08:16):
try to find other sources of food elsewhere. In seventeen
o nine, a major render pest epizootics started in Europe.
An epizootic is basically an epidemic, but involving non human animals.
This lasted for decades and led to the deaths of
as many as two hundred million livestock animals in Europe.
(08:36):
That also led to a lot of people studying the
disease and trying to figure out how to stop it spread.
In seventeen eleven, Johan Canneld 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 lun Cheesy to study render pest and try to
(08:58):
find some way to control it. In seventeen fifteen, land
Cheese published a treatise based on this work, which was
called De Baville Peste. In general, lynd Cheese's infection control
guidelines still hold up pretty well. He recommended restricting livestock movements,
quarantining infected animals, slaughtering animals that had been exposed to
(09:19):
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 variolation to prevent smallpox started to be used more
frequently in Europe. Vary Elation was common in India, China,
(09:39):
and Africa before this point, but it became more widely
known in England and other parts of Europe thanks to
Lady Mary Worley Montague, whose husband had been ambassador to
the Ottoman Empire. Vary Elation 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
(10:02):
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, fear Renders and Petros fun Campin realized that
(10:25):
calves whose mothers had survived render pest were resistant to
their attempted inoculations. This is one of the first documented
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
(10:45):
Maria len Chiesi's methods of preventing render pest. We talked
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 mind in
response to what people were doing with render pest and animals.
Aside from the idea of slaughtering exposed animals to prevent
(11:07):
the spread of the disease, most of the methods for
controlling and epizooetic and animals also applied to an epidemic
in humans. This included establishing cordon sanitaire, or sanitary barriers
around infected populations. The fight against render pest also involved
the first use of thermometers to try to detect fevers
(11:29):
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 and infection control and
(11:52):
veterinary medicine leading up to the nineteenth century, the eighteen
hundreds 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. All of the Highlands
(12:14):
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
(12:35):
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 ant contagion movement that we talked about
in our recent episode on Maxifoon Pettenkofer was connected to
(12:56):
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 its spread. Those orders included ones that required people
to quarantine sick animals and to call potentially diseased livestock.
(13:20):
But some of the orders who were also relatively vague
and contradictory, and they didn't have much enforcement power built
into them. Farmers, cattle traders and others who 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
(13:44):
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 small packs 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
(14:07):
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 the this
plague by that word of power. Tens of thousands of
(14:28):
cattle in Britain were vaccinated 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
(14:48):
continued to get sick and die, when the real reason
was that the disease that was at work was render pest,
not smallpox. Belgian Dr Lewis Villams had also developed a
method of inoculating cattle against a different disease called contagious
bovine plurin pneumonia has involved threading infected material through the
(15:10):
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 past that did
not work. It just spread the disease farther. In mid
February of eighteen sixty six, the Cattle Plague Commission finally
(15:34):
announced that the smallpox vaccination effort was not working, and
they recommended the infection control and quarantine procedures that have
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.
(15:57):
It was not until eighteen sixty seven been 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 pest outbreak and history started
when the disease was introduced into Sub Saharan Africa for
the first time. This was during the Scramble for Africa,
(16:19):
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
(16:43):
this outbreak was probably cattle that Italy had imported into
Africa from the Indian subcontinent. Africa's indigenous people's 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
(17:07):
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.
(17:28):
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
an infected wild buffalo, giraffes, wilde beests, and other animals.
In general, the major source of the disease spread was
(17:49):
domestic herd animals, spreading it to wild animals. The population
density of wild animals, like will to be 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
(18:09):
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 own herds while leaving
(18:30):
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,
(18:55):
all the various human populations in Africa at the time
were were king 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
(19:17):
pest pan zootic, and a widespread famine followed in its wake,
and many parts of Sub Saharan Africa, between half and
two thirds of the human population died of starvation, diseases
are animal attacks, and many African nations, the entire social
order was up ended, both because of the massive death
toll and because the cattle, which had represented wealth and
(19:40):
status in these societies had all died. The render past
pan Zootic 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 eight six, the entire
ecosystem was disrupted In many parts of the African continent.
Grey using animals had kept grass under control. Without those
(20:03):
grazing herds, grass formed thickets, which became breeding grounds for
zi flies, 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,
(20:25):
the Da Beers Company invited bacteriologist Robert Coke 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 afterwards, So first Coke tried to use the blood
of recovered animals to make a vaccine. Although that did
(20:46):
provide a brief immunity, that immunity eventually faded, and the
method also had the potential to spread other blood borne diseases. Eventually,
Coke and veterinarian Arnold Filer developed a method of using
bile from infect did 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
(21:09):
the skin of livestock. Coke and Tyler's method involved killing
an animal that was infected with render pest 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
(21:31):
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 panzilotic lasted until about eight seven,
and then smaller scale episodics continued afterward. We're going to
(21:51):
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.
(22:15):
Many countries where render pest was not present had past
laws that banned the import of livestock or meat from
the places where render pest was endemic. In some cases,
countries also banned cargo ships that had carried livestock from
those countries. In spite of these kinds of precautions, render
pest was introduced in Brazil in nineteen twenty one and
(22:35):
in Australia in ninety 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.
(22:56):
Maurice Nicol and Mustafa adile Bay had demonstrated that it
was caused by a virus in nineteen o 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
(23:18):
way there. From their 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
eradicate 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 Pesteur and Emil Ru
(23:40):
had done to develop a vaccine for rabies in eighteen
eighty five. For Edwards 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 adept it to goats than to cattle,
(24:01):
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
four during a render pest outbreak in France, the Office
(24:24):
Internacionale de Eposotes or o i E 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
Plowwright and his colleagues developed a new render pest vaccine.
They used tissue cultures rather than cereal passage through living
(24:47):
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
(25:07):
from the time it was made to when it was administered,
and this just wasn't feasible for a large scale global
vaccination campaign. Uh 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 million cattle every year. India soon went from
(25:33):
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
(25:55):
to a coordinated international effort to eradicate it completely, that
star did 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,
(26:15):
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,
(26:37):
in nineteen sixty nine, a render pest outbreak in Afghanistan
spread to multiple other nations from there, including Bahrain, Iran, Jordan's, 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 and
(27:00):
for 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
(27:23):
for how old an animal should be before it was vaccinated.
International efforts to eradicate render pest continued from there. The
Pan African Render Past 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, Tufts University School of Veterinary
(27:46):
Medicine and the US Department of Agriculture developed a vaccine
called thermovax in nine two. This vaccine had a thirty
day shelf life that did not require refrigeration during that time.
In for the U N Food and Agricultural Organization launched
its Global Render Pest Eradication Program it's g r EP
(28:08):
or GRIP. From the beginning, it's at 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 GRIP
was working with community based animal health workers. These are
(28:30):
people who personally owned livestock and we're 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
(28:51):
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
(29:13):
that remained their 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 focus their immunization efforts on eliminating the disease
from the migratory population. In the Food and Agricultural Organization
(29:33):
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 the
f a O intensified the program under the slogan of seek, contain,
eliminate after a few outbreaks were connected to the weakened
(29:57):
form of the virus that was used in the vaccine.
The f a O 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 pests, they
were declared render pest free. The last render pest outbreak
on Earth was reported in Sudan in two thousand one.
(30:19):
The last vaccination programs ended in two thousand six. Surveillance
to make sure the disease didn't recur continued for the
next few years until render pest was declared globally eradicated
on May 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 ninety five
(30:43):
and eleven, was five billion dollars. And articles about the eradication,
Dr Peter Rhoder, the Secretary of the f a O
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 and cost eight billion dollars.
This was cheap. To be clear, I think the previous
(31:08):
royal wedding to this was was William and Kate. It
did not cost eight billion dollars, like even if you
factor in, uh the total cost of things like the
public holidays that were around the webbing like like the
super highest estimate that I've seen, including all those like
(31:28):
intangible 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
(31:48):
just personal thought. In November of the O I E
and the f a O announced a global action plan
to prevent the re emergence of render pest. They 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
(32:10):
or transferred 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 eradicated. It has
been declared eliminated in some parts of the world. That
(32:34):
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
(32:55):
fifty four reported cases in twenty nine and polio, which
had ninety four reported cases in although that is a
significant increase over the 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
(33:17):
devastation successful international eradication program. Yeah, uh, do you also
have a little bit of listener mail for us? I do.
It is just a little bit of listener mail. It
is from Nick. Nick wrote about the discovery of insulin
and says, Hello, Tracy and Holly love the show. I
just wanted to send a quick note on the two
part series on insulin. As noted in the show, Frederick
(33:40):
Banting and Charles Best were Canadian researchers. In twenty eleven,
the Bank of Canada issued its first ever polymer bank
notes with the release of the Frontier series. The reverse
of the hundred dollar notes celebrates Canadian doctors and scientists.
Among the contributions depicted on the note is the discovery
of insulin. Uh. And then Nick all So included um
(34:01):
a link that gives this this three hundred sixty degree
of view of what this like. You can spin it
around in your browser window. Um. We don't have a
great way to share links on our website currently, but
if I bet if you googled Bank of Canada hundred
polymer note you you would get to it because that's
the name of the page there. Anyway, So, so thank
(34:24):
you so much. I I had no idea because uh
you and I don't live in Canada, Holly so on
the convenian money right now. Um So, anyway, thank you
Nick for that and for the link. And uh we
hope everybody is, um just doing as well as can
be expected in these times that we're living in. If
(34:46):
you'd like to write to us about this around any
other podcast where History podcast at I heart radio dot com.
And then we are also all over social media, as
missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on
Apple podcast, the I Heart Radio app, anywhere else you
get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
(35:11):
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Holly, You
and I've been talking recently about how it feels weird
(00:22):
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 and for
listeners to just be in a state of um dire
crisis all the time on the show. Yeah, I am.
(00:42):
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.
(01:06):
So we're in this weird place. We're trying to pick
topics um that you know, folks will want to listen
to you, 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,
(01:28):
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 when we did our
episode on Edward Jenner and the smallpox vaccine, we said
(01:50):
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 pests eradication was so recent
at that point that none of our sources referenced it,
Like there were all these things that just very confidently,
(02:11):
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, Holly and I obviously
were both alive in eleven. This was not something that
really stuck with people when it was announced, inn unless
(02:31):
they had a personal 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 talked
about on the show. But render pests history as the
disease goes back way farther than that obviously, and the
process of eradicating the disease really illustrates how it required
(02:55):
a very coordinated international effort to do it. Render pests
is caused by a virus in the genus more Bila virus.
This genus includes other viruses that you may have heard of,
including human measles and canine distemper. There are more Billa
viruses that can infect marine life as well, including dolphins
and whales, and render pest specifically has been around for
(03:18):
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 past infected domestic animals like cattle, sheep,
and goats, as well as at least forty other hoofed mammals,
(03:39):
specifically even towed ungulates like wild beast, antelope, deer, buffalo,
and giraffe. It did not infect human beings, although that
wasn't necessarily always true. Render Past'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
(04:00):
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 step muran murn being another word
for pestilence, and step coming from its prevalence in the
steps of Asia and southeastern Europe. It was known as
(04:22):
Sadoca 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
(04:42):
Past 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.
(05:02):
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
(05:24):
and then they would develop a fever. Early symptoms of
the acute illness included watery discharges from the eyes and nose,
causing the animals 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
(05:45):
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 irhea led to dehydration and death. A typical strain
of render pest could cause a mortality rate of up
(06:06):
to nine and susceptible animals. There were some exceptions. Some
strains of the virus weren't as lethal, but they could
have other effects. For example, kudos, which are antelopes with
spiral horns, could survive milder forms of render pest, but
tended to develop blindness because the virus infected their eyes.
(06:26):
The Mongol Empires 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
and recorded history isn't quite that long. Cattle plagues of
various sorts are documented going back to about three thousand
(06:47):
BC e 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,
(07:08):
render pest outbreaks frequently followed in the wake of war.
As we noted earlier, the Mongol empires 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
(07:31):
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
(07:55):
more and more widespread. Even though render pest didn't directly
infect human's the disease could still cause huge loss of
human life. Large render pest outbreaks could leave communities without
their sources of meat or milk, with without the animals
that they needed to cultivate the land without the dung
that they needed to fertilize it, and without transportation to
(08:16):
try to find other sources of food elsewhere. In seventeen
o nine, a major render pest epizootics started in Europe.
An epizootic is basically an epidemic, but involving non human animals.
This lasted for decades and led to the deaths of
as many as two hundred million livestock animals in Europe.
(08:36):
That also led to a lot of people studying the
disease and trying to figure out how to stop it spread.
In seventeen eleven, Johan Canneld 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 lun Cheesy to study render pest and try to
(08:58):
find some way to control it. In seventeen fifteen, land
Cheese published a treatise based on this work, which was
called De Baville Peste. In general, lynd Cheese's infection control
guidelines still hold up pretty well. He recommended restricting livestock movements,
quarantining infected animals, slaughtering animals that had been exposed to
(09:19):
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 variolation to prevent smallpox started to be used more
frequently in Europe. Vary Elation was common in India, China,
(09:39):
and Africa before this point, but it became more widely
known in England and other parts of Europe thanks to
Lady Mary Worley Montague, whose husband had been ambassador to
the Ottoman Empire. Vary Elation 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
(10:02):
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, fear Renders and Petros fun Campin realized that
(10:25):
calves whose mothers had survived render pest were resistant to
their attempted inoculations. This is one of the first documented
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
(10:45):
Maria len Chiesi's methods of preventing render pest. We talked
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 mind in
response to what people were doing with render pest and animals.
Aside from the idea of slaughtering exposed animals to prevent
(11:07):
the spread of the disease, most of the methods for
controlling and epizooetic and animals also applied to an epidemic
in humans. This included establishing cordon sanitaire, or sanitary barriers
around infected populations. The fight against render pest also involved
the first use of thermometers to try to detect fevers
(11:29):
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 and infection control and
(11:52):
veterinary medicine leading up to the nineteenth century, the eighteen
hundreds 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. All of the Highlands
(12:14):
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
(12:35):
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 ant contagion movement that we talked about
in our recent episode on Maxifoon Pettenkofer was connected to
(12:56):
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 its spread. Those orders included ones that required people
to quarantine sick animals and to call potentially diseased livestock.
(13:20):
But some of the orders who were also relatively vague
and contradictory, and they didn't have much enforcement power built
into them. Farmers, cattle traders and others who 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
(13:44):
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 small packs 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
(14:07):
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 the this
plague by that word of power. Tens of thousands of
(14:28):
cattle in Britain were vaccinated 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
(14:48):
continued to get sick and die, when the real reason
was that the disease that was at work was render pest,
not smallpox. Belgian Dr Lewis Villams had also developed a
method of inoculating cattle against a different disease called contagious
bovine plurin pneumonia has involved threading infected material through the
(15:10):
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 past that did
not work. It just spread the disease farther. In mid
February of eighteen sixty six, the Cattle Plague Commission finally
(15:34):
announced that the smallpox vaccination effort was not working, and
they recommended the infection control and quarantine procedures that have
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.
(15:57):
It was not until eighteen sixty seven been 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 pest outbreak and history started
when the disease was introduced into Sub Saharan Africa for
the first time. This was during the Scramble for Africa,
(16:19):
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
(16:43):
this outbreak was probably cattle that Italy had imported into
Africa from the Indian subcontinent. Africa's indigenous people's 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
(17:07):
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.
(17:28):
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
an infected wild buffalo, giraffes, wilde beests, and other animals.
In general, the major source of the disease spread was
(17:49):
domestic herd animals, spreading it to wild animals. The population
density of wild animals, like will to be 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
(18:09):
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 own herds while leaving
(18:30):
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,
(18:55):
all the various human populations in Africa at the time
were were king 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
(19:17):
pest pan zootic, and a widespread famine followed in its wake,
and many parts of Sub Saharan Africa, between half and
two thirds of the human population died of starvation, diseases
are animal attacks, and many African nations, the entire social
order was up ended, both because of the massive death
toll and because the cattle, which had represented wealth and
(19:40):
status in these societies had all died. The render past
pan Zootic 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 eight six, the entire
ecosystem was disrupted In many parts of the African continent.
Grey using animals had kept grass under control. Without those
(20:03):
grazing herds, grass formed thickets, which became breeding grounds for
zi flies, 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,
(20:25):
the Da Beers Company invited bacteriologist Robert Coke 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 afterwards, So first Coke tried to use the blood
of recovered animals to make a vaccine. Although that did
(20:46):
provide a brief immunity, that immunity eventually faded, and the
method also had the potential to spread other blood borne diseases. Eventually,
Coke and veterinarian Arnold Filer developed a method of using
bile from infect did 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
(21:09):
the skin of livestock. Coke and Tyler's method involved killing
an animal that was infected with render pest 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
(21:31):
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 panzilotic lasted until about eight seven,
and then smaller scale episodics continued afterward. We're going to
(21:51):
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.
(22:15):
Many countries where render pest was not present had past
laws that banned the import of livestock or meat from
the places where render pest was endemic. In some cases,
countries also banned cargo ships that had carried livestock from
those countries. In spite of these kinds of precautions, render
pest was introduced in Brazil in nineteen twenty one and
(22:35):
in Australia in ninety 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.
(22:56):
Maurice Nicol and Mustafa adile Bay had demonstrated that it
was caused by a virus in nineteen o 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
(23:18):
way there. From their 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
eradicate 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 Pesteur and Emil Ru
(23:40):
had done to develop a vaccine for rabies in eighteen
eighty five. For Edwards 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 adept it to goats than to cattle,
(24:01):
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
four during a render pest outbreak in France, the Office
(24:24):
Internacionale de Eposotes or o i E 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
Plowwright and his colleagues developed a new render pest vaccine.
They used tissue cultures rather than cereal passage through living
(24:47):
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
(25:07):
from the time it was made to when it was administered,
and this just wasn't feasible for a large scale global
vaccination campaign. Uh 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 million cattle every year. India soon went from
(25:33):
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
(25:55):
to a coordinated international effort to eradicate it completely, that
star did 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,
(26:15):
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,
(26:37):
in nineteen sixty nine, a render pest outbreak in Afghanistan
spread to multiple other nations from there, including Bahrain, Iran, Jordan's, 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 and
(27:00):
for 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
(27:23):
for how old an animal should be before it was vaccinated.
International efforts to eradicate render pest continued from there. The
Pan African Render Past 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, Tufts University School of Veterinary
(27:46):
Medicine and the US Department of Agriculture developed a vaccine
called thermovax in nine two. This vaccine had a thirty
day shelf life that did not require refrigeration during that time.
In for the U N Food and Agricultural Organization launched
its Global Render Pest Eradication Program it's g r EP
(28:08):
or GRIP. From the beginning, it's at 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 GRIP
was working with community based animal health workers. These are
(28:30):
people who personally owned livestock and we're 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
(28:51):
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
(29:13):
that remained their 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 focus their immunization efforts on eliminating the disease
from the migratory population. In the Food and Agricultural Organization
(29:33):
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 the
f a O intensified the program under the slogan of seek, contain,
eliminate after a few outbreaks were connected to the weakened
(29:57):
form of the virus that was used in the vaccine.
The f a O 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 pests, they
were declared render pest free. The last render pest outbreak
on Earth was reported in Sudan in two thousand one.
(30:19):
The last vaccination programs ended in two thousand six. Surveillance
to make sure the disease didn't recur continued for the
next few years until render pest was declared globally eradicated
on May 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 ninety five
(30:43):
and eleven, was five billion dollars. And articles about the eradication,
Dr Peter Rhoder, the Secretary of the f a O
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 and cost eight billion dollars.
This was cheap. To be clear, I think the previous
(31:08):
royal wedding to this was was William and Kate. It
did not cost eight billion dollars, like even if you
factor in, uh the total cost of things like the
public holidays that were around the webbing like like the
super highest estimate that I've seen, including all those like
(31:28):
intangible 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
(31:48):
just personal thought. In November of the O I E
and the f a O announced a global action plan
to prevent the re emergence of render pest. They 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
(32:10):
or transferred 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 eradicated. It has
been declared eliminated in some parts of the world. That
(32:34):
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
(32:55):
fifty four reported cases in twenty nine and polio, which
had ninety four reported cases in although that is a
significant increase over the 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
(33:17):
devastation successful international eradication program. Yeah, uh, do you also
have a little bit of listener mail for us? I do.
It is just a little bit of listener mail. It
is from Nick. Nick wrote about the discovery of insulin
and says, Hello, Tracy and Holly love the show. I
just wanted to send a quick note on the two
part series on insulin. As noted in the show, Frederick
(33:40):
Banting and Charles Best were Canadian researchers. In twenty eleven,
the Bank of Canada issued its first ever polymer bank
notes with the release of the Frontier series. The reverse
of the hundred dollar notes celebrates Canadian doctors and scientists.
Among the contributions depicted on the note is the discovery
of insulin. Uh. And then Nick all So included um
(34:01):
a link that gives this this three hundred sixty degree
of view of what this like. You can spin it
around in your browser window. Um. We don't have a
great way to share links on our website currently, but
if I bet if you googled Bank of Canada hundred
polymer note you you would get to it because that's
the name of the page there. Anyway, So, so thank
(34:24):
you so much. I I had no idea because uh
you and I don't live in Canada, Holly so on
the convenian money right now. Um So, anyway, thank you
Nick for that and for the link. And uh we
hope everybody is, um just doing as well as can
be expected in these times that we're living in. If
(34:46):
you'd like to write to us about this around any
other podcast where History podcast at I heart radio dot com.
And then we are also all over social media, as
missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on
Apple podcast, the I Heart Radio app, anywhere else you
get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
(35:11):
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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