This Podcast Will Kill You - Ep 52 Rinderpest: Moo Cows, Moo Problems

Episode Date: June 23, 2020

The second disease ever to be eradicated, rinderpest could be the most devastating and notorious infection you never knew existed. Though its name means “cattle plague”, the deadly rinderpest virus infected hundreds of species of animals during its long reign, and outbreaks of rinderpest left nothing but famine and ruin in their wake. In this episode, we start by taking you through the biology of one of the biggest killers we’ve ever faced. We then trace the long history of this feared disease, from fire festival rituals in Russia to the imperialist exploitation of the Great African Rinderpest Panzootic of the 1890s that paved the way for European colonial rule over a large part of the continent. Fortunately, this story ends happily as only one other has done so far - with complete and total eradication. You may have started this episode not knowing about rinderpest, but when you’re done, you won’t be able to stop talking about it. Trust us. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Terms and conditions apply. Visit blueapron.com slash terms for more information. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story? Evidence has been made to fit. The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed. What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to book?

Oh, my God. I think she might be innocent. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Lettby on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckerd. In 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. But here's the thing. Bachelor fans hated him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. That's when his life took a disturbing turn. A one-night stand would end in a courtroom. The media is here. This case. has gone viral. The dating contract.

Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. Listen to Love Trapped on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. But a far more general plague than the smallpox and a much more general scourge than the locusts suddenly made its appearance and dogged our steps. This was the Rinderpest. No one who has not lived in Africa can form the least idea of this awful calamity. It mowed down the whole bovine race in its passage. Hundreds of carcasses lay here and there on the roadside or piled up in the fields.

In vain did legions of vultures and beasts of prey gather to devour them. They could not overtake the quantity, and the carrion lay there, putrefying everywhere. More than 900 wagons, loaded with merchandise, without teams or drivers, stood abandoned along the Bulawayo Road. In a few weeks, a few months, let us say, I am assured. that 800,000 head of cattle, some say 900,000 perished in Kama's tribe alone. Never within the memory of man had such a thing been seen. The government grasped the situation from the beginning, but in spite of all the sanitary cordons and the severest preventative measures, the scourge pursued its course relentlessly. Yeah. 800 to 900,000? Oh, that's like in one

area, like in one person's herd, yeah. Oh, my. Yeah. It was very challenging to pick just one first-hand account. There are so many. Oh, my gosh. And I managed to sprinkle a few more in there. So that was from someone named Francois Colliard in 1897 about the arrival of Rinderpest in South Africa. Wow. Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh. And I'm Aaron Olman Updike. And this is, this podcast will kill you. And today we're talking about one of the most serious and intense diseases that you may have never heard of. It's amazing how much more devastating it is than I thought it was going to be. Like I knew it was a big deal. Yeah. But holy cow, the sheer devastation and loss of life and the impact through history is like,

I yeah I really I always try so hard to not get any of the history in my readings but it was kind of hard to not see little glimpses and oh my god oh yeah oh yeah so what disease is it Aaron we're talking about today we're talking about Rinderpest which is the German for cattle plague so it's a disease of cattle surprise surprise but Really, it's as intense as anything you would ever want. Like, if you're like, I don't care about cows, you're going to care about these cows. So, Erin, what are we drinking for Rinderpest? We are drinking utter delight. Oh, my goodness gracious. Another milky one, Erin?

It's like milky but not milky, milky, you know? Sure. It's milk M-E-L-K. Exactly. This is basically a pinocalada, but we've used coconut ice cream instead of coconut cream of coconut. Yeah. So you could make it how you want it. Yeah.

I mean, if you are lactose intolerant, like our friend Katie, you can use something else besides coconut ice cream. Like those coconut cream ice cream. that they have. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yum. Those are good. They're very good. And we'll post the full recipe for this quarantini as well as our non-alcoholic placebo-rita on our website. This podcast will kill you.com. Yep. And our social media, of course. Of course. Aaron, do we have any business to take care of? I really don't think so. Oh, 52 episodes. Keep counting. We're starting to keep track again. Yeah, for like another episode until I forget.

Awesome. Erin, can we just dive in? Because I really want to know how this virus works. Oh, I'm really excited to tell you about it. Okay. Let's take a quick break first. Dinner shows up every night, whether you're prepared for it or not. And with Blue Apron, you won't need to panic order takeout again.

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You can order meals when you want them and skip when you don't without adding another recurring charge. Order now at Blue Apron.com. Get 50% off your first two orders plus free shipping with code this podcast 50. Terms and conditions apply. Visit blue apron.com slash terms for more information. Anyone who works long hours knows the routine. Wash, sanitize, repeat. By the end of the day, your hands feel like they've been through something.

That's why O'Keefe's working hands hand cream is such a relief. It's a concentrated hand cream that is specifically designed to relieve extremely dry, cracked hands caused by constant hand washing and harsh conditions. Working hands creates a protective layer on the skin that locks in moisture. It's non-greasy, unscented, and absorbs quickly. A little goes a long way. Moisturization that lasts up to 48 hours. It's made for people whose hands take a beating at work, from health care and food service to salon, lab, and caregiving environments. It's been relied on for decades by people who wash their hands constantly or work in harsh conditions because it actually works. O'Keefs is my hand cream of choice in these dry Colorado winters when it feels like my skin is always on the verge of cracking.

It keeps them soft and smooth, no matter how harsh it is outside. We're offering our listeners 15% off their first order of O'Keef's. Just visit O'Keef's company.com slash this podcast and code this podcast at checkout. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict? A villain. A nurse named Lucy Letby. Lucy Letby has been found guilty.

But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, doubt the case of Lucy Lettby, we follow the evidence and hear from the... people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Lettby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So this might be a new disease that we're talking about. I mean, not new. It's really old. You'll tell us that.

But it's also not going to be too new for some long-time listeners. Okay? Okay. I think I know why. You do know why, Erin. So Rinderpest is the disease caused by Rinderpest virus, RPV, which is in the genus Morbilla virus, which happens to be the same family of viruses as one of our favorite human pathogens, measles.

Mm-hmm. Tana. So I'm going to likely throughout the biology and especially in the current section do some compare-contrast with what we already know about measles when we talk about this disease and its effects. Okay? Yeah. And it turns out there's actually a lot of viruses in this family that are worthy of our concern. Measles we've talked about. But there are also a couple of other important morbilliviruses.

PPR or Pes de Peeples. Kiti ruminant virus is, that means the plague of small ruminants. That affects sheeps and goats. There's also canine distemper virus, which if you have a dog, your dog has had to be vaccinated against canine distemper. Right. And then there are also a lot of marine morbilloviruses that cause illness in dolphins and whales and seals, which is super sad.

It's also really fascinating. Is it direct contact transmission? That's a really good question. I don't actually know. one of the papers or one of the books that I read had a section on them, but I had too much reading to do, so I skipped over it. So I don't actually know how they're transmitted, but I had that same thought. It's really interesting to think about like aquatic or marine transmission of infectious disease. Yeah. Okay, so speaking of transmission, much like measles, Rinder pest virus is a highly infectious virus.

it spread. I saw reports that it spread via the respiratory root, which is how measles virus, of course, is spread. But really what it boils down to is that this is a virus that's spread by close contact with sick animals. So once a sick animal enters like a herd, close contact with that animal is how that virus will spread. So it's not just through airborne transmission. And can it also be transmitted by, let's say, a person traveling from herd to herd? or farm to farm? Potentially, yeah, because this virus is contained in a lot of the bodily fluids from animals, then if that person had that fluid, then potentially. It doesn't live for very long outside of the body, though. So it would have to be pretty like immediate contact, I think. Like maybe a veterinarian or someone moving from a sick animal directly to another herd or something like that. Yep. Okay. That makes sense.

Yeah. All right. So importantly, while, we talked about cows, and this is often called cattle plague. This is a virus that infects a huge range of animal species, not just cows. Essentially, it can affect pretty much the entire order of ardeodactylla, which is the even-toed ungulates. I had to Google a lot about ungulates, just to do this episode. I love ungulates. I had no idea that there was, was even-toed ungulates and odd-toed ungulates. Didn't know that was a thing. Oh, yeah. You knew that already. Well, I'll just come from camera trapping and having to do all the... Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. So for those of you who don't, aren't familiar with the even-toed ungulates,

this includes water buffalo, wildebeest, yak, zibu, hippos, gazelles, impalas, the greater kudu, orrix, orribi, wart hogs, pigs, goats, sheep. Pretty much all of the, ungulates except the odd-toed ones, which are horses, zebras, rhinoceroses, and tapirs. Okay? Cool. All right. But one thing that's really important is that although Rinderpest virus can infect all these different species, there are a lot of different strains of Renderpest virus that differ greatly in their virulence, so how sick they make the animal, as well as their ability to actually infect these different species. So it's very possible to have. an outbreak in, for example, a herd of water buffalo that seems like it doesn't infect the

giraffes that are sharing the watering hole, even though giraffes in general are highly susceptible to render pest virus. Okay. That explains a lot about some of the reports and like firsthand accounts of that, yeah, that I'll talk about. Yeah, yeah. So there's definitely times where there's outbreaks that seem like they're only in a certain group of animal, and it's likely just because of the strain.

of that particular virus. Gotcha. All right. So since this is a virus, we know that it has to infect host cells in order to multiply. And in the case of Renderpest virus, there are two different types of cells that this virus infects. And you'll see that the cell types that this virus infects result in the symptoms of disease that we see. So first, it infects the epithelial cells, which we've talked about a lot on this podcast. Epithelial cells are those that line the tubes of your body and ungulate bodies also. So like your mouth, your respiratory tract, your digestive tract. And then also the lymphoid tissue. So that's like tonsils, lymph nodes, spleen. The intestine also has lymph lymph tissue that are called pyres patches. Those are really important in this infection. And lymphoid tissue is where basically,

mammalian bodies fight off infection. That's where our white blood cells congregate, and so that's how animals fight off infection. Gotcha. Yeah. All right. So in this case, the damage that we see and the symptoms that we see from this infection are from direct viral damage to these cells. A lot of times when we talk about virus infections, we are like, are the symptoms because of the virus, or are they because of your body's reaction to the virus. And so in this case, it really is a ton of damage from the virus that are causing these symptoms. Okay? Gotcha.

Yep. All right. Let's talk about the symptoms. Yeah. It's bad. It's gnarly. It's really gnarly. Okay.

There are four or five stages of disease depending on which textbook you read. But they're really similar. So they are. probation, prodrome, mucosal phase, which is sometimes combined with the diarrheal phase, and then the convalescent phase, parentheses, or death. Which the or death is. It's not funny.

If you get to the convalescent phase, you are an extremely lucky ungulate. Or you had a very, you know, a non-virulent strain. Fair, yes. Yeah. Yes. Okay. So let's go through these phases. The incubation period, we know, is the time from when you first get infected until you start to show symptoms.

So in the case of Rinderpest virus, most reports say this is between three to nine days, but it really depends on the strain. So it can be as great as 11 or even 15 days if it's a less virulent strain. But in general, three to nine days. Do these strains have any pattern in geographical distribution? Rinderpest virus comes from Asia. So are strains less virulent there? Is that one of the drivers? Good question. I'm not sure if strains are less virulent in Asia as compared to like Africa, for example. But they definitely do vary geographically. And really it's about like the species which they infect.

So a strain might be really virulent in wildebeest, but then less virulent in a giraffe if they even can get infected at all. Why? Oh, great question. It's such a good question. And I don't also know, like, how many different strains are there? Are there dozens? Are there hundreds? I don't know.

But there's a lot. There's more than, like, a couple. Interesting. Yeah, I knew that there were a bunch of strains, but now I have so many questions. Well, we'll see if I answer any of them. All right. Then you'll begin the pro-dromal phase. The pro-drom, we've talked about a lot.

lot on this podcast, but it's basically non-specific symptoms before you get to the real symptoms of disease. And so this prodromal phase usually lasts about three days. And the symptoms start with, wait for it, a fever? A fever? I love it. And generally, I mean, I don't love it. Generally, it's a very sudden onset of fever, which can get as high as 41. 5C, which is 106.7 Fahrenheit. What is the normal body temperature for an ungulate? Oh, I'm so glad that you asked because I looked it up. I found one paper.

This was looking at Jemsbach and Wildebeest. So for them, the average body temperature varied depending on environmental conditions between 37.5 and 39 C, so that's 99.5 Fahrenheit. and 102.2 Fahrenheit. Okay, so it's really not that. I mean, it's a high fever, but it's not like in humans, it's not as concerning as that temperature would be in humans. Right.

I mean, but still, it's render pest, so it's bad news. It's really high, I think, no matter what. Like, in humans, that fever could kill you easily. But even for an ungulate, even at their high end of temperature range of 102, 106 is four full Fahrenheit degrees higher than that. That's pretty, that's high. Yeah. No, it's definitely a high fever.

So anyways. So then this pro-dramal phase also has some other non-specific symptoms. Restlessness, anorexia, so the animal might stop eating. Always, I've seen the descriptions, their muzzle gets dry. So the hairs around their muzzle get really dry. If they are lactating, their milk yield will drop. Their breathing will become fast. It will become shallow and more rapid.

And then their mucous membranes start to get congested with secretions. So their mouth, their nose, their eyes, start having perulant secretions coming out of them. Sounds pretty terrible. Pretty terrible. And that's just the Prodrome stage. Just stage two. Just stage two. Cool.

Then you enter the mucosal phase. This starts about two to five days after the first onset of fever. And it starts with. tiny little pinhead spots of necrosis, so tissue death, in those epithelial cells in the mucous membrane, which looks like little pinpoint gray or white spots in the mouth of the animal. Does that sound familiar to you? Because it should. It sounds like measles?

It sounds like coplic spots, which are pathognonic for measles in humans. It's exactly what I was going to say. I totally had those words right there. I haven't forgotten that at all. You did remember, though, measles. That's pretty good. Well, only because they're like very similar. I know they're like the same.

I know. Oh, but isn't that so interesting? Oh, I think that's so interesting. It's interesting. And all I can think of is like, you know, I picture owning cattle and then doing a check and seeing those spots and being like, oh, God. Just terrified. Knowing what's ahead of you is horrible. It's not good.

It just gets worse. Let's keep going. So in the affected animals, the spots appear in the mouth and then they tend to extend. So whereas in measles, they just tend to be those pinpoint spots. Here they're going to start to enlarge. They're going to involve larger and larger areas of epithelium, the tongue, the pharynx. And these spots are not only contained in the mouth. These mucosal erosions are happening throughout the entire digestive system as well.

Okay. So that leads into the next phase, which is sometimes combined with this, and that is the diarrheal phase. That makes sense. Your body just basically can't digest anything. Exactly. Yeah. So this diarrheal phase, if you separated out, tends to start about four to five days after the onset of fever, one to three days after the first spots appear in the mouth.

And it's basically uncontrolled, profuse diarrhea. Liquid, explosive, green, yellow, gray at first, and then with a lot of mucus and blood. And that's because those erosions have extended to most of the digestive tract. Oh, my gosh. I know. It's horrific. Yeah. And that's kind of the biggest, like, animals often die from dehydration from just the massive, massive amount of

diarrhea. You can also see a maculopopular rash, which is the same type of rash that we see in human measles, on areas of soft skin of the animal that don't have a lot of hair covering them. So like the udders or in the groin or the axila, the armpits and leg pits. And then you'll still have the discharges from the eyes and the nose. These animals are very, very sick. Even though the fever tends to subside by this time, they're just, I mean, they're wasting away, right? They're not eating because these erosions are likely also, they're throughout the pharynx. They can be in the respiratory tract as well. So they're not eating a lot. They're salivating a lot. They're not moving. They often have coughing and grunting with exhalation, suggesting that breathing

is painful or difficult. They become severely dehydrated. And they often adopt this characteristic stance that's called milk fever posture, which I looked up what it looks like. This is not milk fever. That's something entirely different. But it's basically where they put their sternum onto the ground. And then they kind of flop onto their side and their head turns to one side. And their legs are kind of slumped underneath them. And most often they'll die within five to 14 days after the first onset of illness. This is so sad. It's really, really sad. When are they first infectious?

Great question. They're most infectious after the onset of symptoms. So there have been, like, in a lot of experimental studies, you can, like, swab an animal and then infect another animal before those symptoms first start. But really, it's once the symptoms start, once those spots appear, and they're symptomatic, that's when they're most infectious. Okay, so in the mucosal phase. Yes, the mucosal and diarrheal phase, yeah.

And that diarrhea full of virus. I was going to say. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm just imagining being a vet before you knew what Rinderpest was and how it was transmitted and walking and your boots on one farm and going to the next farm, walking on your boots. Like, it's so easy. The good thing is it doesn't live for very long in the environment. Do you know how long? Most of the things I saw were like 48 hours max.

Okay. Yeah. That's long enough. I mean, it is, but, you know, it's also like, I think that you need, they mostly were suggesting that you would need really high concentrations of the virus in the environment for an animal to get infected just from environmental exposure. Mm-hmm. Okay. So, yeah. If the animal doesn't die, so if they had kind of a less virulent strain, for example, or if they somehow happened to survive this infection, the convalescent phase, is the last phase, it's quite prolonged. While the lesions, those mucosal lesions, tend to heal within a week or so, there's often secondary bacterial infections on top of those, and the diarrhea takes a really long time to resolve, like four to five weeks. Yeah, I can imagine it would have to come with long-term health effects.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Speaking of long-term effects, you remember in our measles episode, we talked about how much measles wrecks our immune system. Uh-huh. Immune amnesia. Mm-hmm. Measles causes immunosuppression immediately after the infection that can persist for a long time, as well as causing, like, that immune amnesia that you mentioned, where we can no longer fight off infections we had previously been exposed to.

Rinderpest also absolutely wreaks havoc on the immune system of these animals. So it's very common that even if an animal survives Rinderpest infection, latent infections can become activated after. So things that they maybe had some bacteria kind of growing somewhere or a parasite or something that kind of their body was just low level taking care of, now can become reactivated and they can become more ill from a second infection afterwards. And it's because remember that this virus infects your lymph tissue, right? So it's actively causing depletion of your immune cells.

That's one of the hallmark kind of lab signs that you would see if you were to draw a cow's blood while it's infected. They'd have almost no white blood cells. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. It's really, really depressing. Overall mortality rates are often over-night.

90% approaching 100%. It's unreal. Yeah. I mean, it's very real, but it's hard to believe. I know. It's absolutely horrific. I mean, that's the disease in a nutshell. It's a really bad one.

It is a really bad one. So should I say the good news right now, just so that people don't get too depressed before we start on the history? Sure. We eradicated it. Yeah. It's the second disease to be eradicated. Ever in the history of diseases.

It's so cool. It's so cool. It's very, very cool. So this disease no longer exists in the wild, in domestic animals. It doesn't exist except in laboratory vials. Yep. And a lot of labs, not all, but some have destroyed their stocks. Yes, they sure have, which is great.

So, yeah, so Aaron, what the heck? I can't wait to tell you. I want to know everything. Where did it come from? How bad has it been? Like, oh, I want to know it all. Okay. Let's take a quick break first.

Anyone who works long hours knows the routine. Wash, sanitize, repeat. By the end of the day, your hands feel like they've been through something. That's why O'Keefe's working hands hand cream, is such a relief. It's a concentrated hand cream that is specifically designed to relieve extremely dry, cracked hands caused by constant hand washing and harsh conditions. Working hands creates a protective layer on the skin that locks in moisture. It's non-greasy, unscented, and absorbs quickly. A little goes a long way. Moistrization that lasts up to 48 hours. It's made for people whose hands take a beating

at work, from health care and food service to salon, lab, and caregiving environments. It's been relied on for decades by people who wash their hands constantly or work in harsh conditions because it actually works. O'Keefs is my hand cream of choice in these dry Colorado winters when it feels like my skin is always on the verge of cracking. It keeps them soft and smooth, no matter how harsh it is outside. We're offering our listeners 15% off their first order of O'Keef's. Just visit o'Keefscombe.com slash this podcast and code this podcast at checkout. In 2023, a story The story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies

is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Leppie. Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it

to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Lettby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, The Case of Lucy Letby on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall.

This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes. of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question of his life. And that's the unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable.

This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its fault of secrets. Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Even though Rinderpest is highly related to measles, as you mentioned, I think that one appropriate comparison is that Rinder Pest is basically the smallpox of the cattle world, even though there's also cowpox. But this is much worse than cowpox, right? It's much worse than cowpox.

And so the reason I say that is because if you think about our smallpox episode, you or just think about smallpox, you may remember it is a horribly devastating, super contagious, fatal disease. And there have been massive epidemics that have killed huge numbers of people and paved the way for colonialism. And then just as with smallpox, there's this happy ending with the eradication of the disease. So all you have to do in thinking about smallpox is replace people with cattle. And there you go. So story over. Just listen to our smallpox episode. There you go. There you go. And my work here is done. No, not really. But yeah, so as you talked about Aaron, Rinderpest is a horrible disease and has had a huge economic impact in affected areas.

And it's obviously been eradicated. But I think to understand why there was such an effort made to eradicate this disease, because eradication requires a lot of resources, a lot of time, a lot of money. and it's also like not possible for all pathogens. And so why is this one? Why did we choose to eradicate Rinderpest? And to understand that, I think it calls for talking about its massive history. Yes. Because it is so massive and so interesting and I had no idea.

So I'm very excited. Okay. Where did Render Pest come from? Well, it's very, very, very old. Like measles, so as we talked about in the measles episode, there's going to be a lot of that. Measles requires a certain size of a population, a population density, in order to be sustained. Otherwise, it just burns itself out and then it's gone. And that's the same thing for Rinderpest virus.

And cattle and other ungulates are herd animals. And they probably reached that critical mass before humans did. So it's thought that Rinderpest may have evolved with bovine since the Pleistocene, so like 2 million to 12,000 years ago, somewhere in there. But domestication probably facilitated its transmission and allowed for it to be sustained within these populations. And then once humans grew in large enough populations, Rinder pest jumped species and involved into the measles virus maybe five to seven thousand years ago, maybe as recently as the 11th

Century. If you want to hear more, listen to our measles episode. Rinderpest probably had its geographical origins in Asia and was probably restricted to that part of the world until around 370-ish current era, at least as far as we can say for sure, as far as like there is universal agreement, mostly universal agreement. Is there universal agreement in anything in science? No. Gravity, maybe. So there are some mentions in papyri from ancient Egypt that might be Renderpest dating back to 3,000 BCE, describing an ill bull with labored breathing, runny eyes, inflamed gums, and a swollen neck. And the treatment was either to submerge the bull in water or cover it with cucumber slices, if that didn't work.

Wait, what? Yeah. To cool it down because it was thought to be like, they think that was indicating that it was like a fever. That's why you had to cool it down. You're like cool as a cucumber? Yeah, exactly. Oh my goodness. That would take a lot of cucumbers.

I know. I don't know how many you would need. How many cucumbers would you need to cover an average size bowl? Should we ask Siri? We'll ask the internet. The listeners. Someone did the math for us. Just kidding.

And also Rinderpest may have been the fifth plague of Egypt mentioned in Exodus. What? So from Exodus, this is a line from Exodus. This is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrew says. Let my people go so that they may worship me. If you refuse to let them go and continue to hold them back, the hand of the Lord will bring a terrible plague on your livestock in the field. On your horses and donkeys and camels and on your cattle and sheep and goats.

Horses are in there too. So maybe not. Could have been anthrax. We don't know. And some researchers point to a description of a cattle disease in Ireland from around 2048 BCE, but it's debated whether that's actually Rinderpest. Okay. Because the challenging thing about tracing back these early mentions of Render Pest is trying to distinguish it from all of the other horrible diseases that affected cattle and livestock. So namely foot and mouth disease and also, as a lot of the other horrible diseases, is trying to distinguish it from all of the other horrible diseases that affected cattle. foot and mouth disease and also, as I said, anthrax. But usually you can tell between an anthrax epidemic and a rindapest epidemic in like historical texts. If the descriptions are of just

cattle being affected, then it's probably rinder pest. But if it's cattle and humans and dogs and other animals, then it's probably anthrax. That makes sense. Okay. So that brings us to the first recognized description. Around 370 current era, the Huns began their invasion of Europe, starting in the southeast. They brought with them gray steppe oxen, which happened to be remarkably resistant to Rinderpest, so about a 25% mortality rate instead of the 95-200-percent experienced by other cattle. But even though these oxen were resistant, they could still spread the disease. And spread it they did. And so after the invasion by the Huns, a combination of drought and rinderpest led to the deaths

of nearly all the cattle in Europe around this time, especially Southeast Europe. Yep. And this plague raged for nearly 10 years from 376 to 386 current era, impacting Rome, Belgium, Hungary, Austria, France, etc. Wow. It was big, yeah. And from this first epidemic, the disease basically basically was. became established. It became endemic in Europe with epidemics occurring every few years, just like we

see with measles. Once you get enough susceptibles back into the population, then you get another outbreak, and then there aren't enough to sustain it, and so on and so forth. And the length of these epidemics varied based on how many susceptible cattle there were, the movement of the cattle, whether there were any control measures or enacted, how politically stable a region was. You know, it varied. But So even though the length varied, what they did was perpetuate it enough so that Rinderpest kind of slowly spread throughout the rest of Europe, finally reaching England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales around 694 to 707 current era. Wow.

And that was another horrific outbreak, which led to famine in which people reportedly had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. And there it was called step moraine because it was thought to have come from the step country around the Caspian Basin, so like between southern Europe and Asia, just a little side note. But if you remember from our lactose intolerance episode, different parts of Europe relied on pastoralism to different degrees. And so the impact of Rinderpest may have varied based on that. And so in a place like England, which had a higher reliance on cattle, like it was really devastating. Right. That makes sense. And that very first Rinderpest epidemic following the invasion of the Huns started a long, long period of Rinderpest rule in Europe and Asia.

And a few patterns emerged. So like I said, there was a cyclical pattern where epidemics would occur every few years, and they were often associated with drought. Drought seemed to actually be a trigger for Rinderpest because the stress and malnutrition weakened the immune system. And also, if you have a drought, then your water sources tend to be more concentrated, so then you get congregation. They congregate.

Oh, gosh. Double triple whammy, man. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And another pattern was that Rinder Pest became known as a disease of war. If you were heading a warring army or whatever, you had to bring. a ton of equipment with you, like weapons and food and tents and clothing. And so oxen were in super high demand. You had to have huge teams of oxen. And you're bringing them these oxen from

one place to another, allowing for, you know, pathogen mixing, basically. That's not good. And also armies would travel with cattle as a food source, as a portable food source. And not just food, but also for materials like leather and, you know, cattle, you can do a lot with one cow. Yes, you sure can. It's amazing. And so there's no doubt that Rinderpest changed the course of history by impacting warring armies and who made it where and when and who could actually leave. Wow.

So, for example, Charlemagne's campaigns in Central Europe around 800 CE were slowed down by Rinderpest. Quote, so great was the pestilence of oxen in this expedition that scared. In the whole army did one remain, but all perished. And not only there, but a plague among animals, causing a dreadful mortality broke out in all the provinces conquered by the emperor. Wow. So it's like it happened. It happened a lot, and it was devastating.

And just the rise of trade and increase in human movements also led to a rise in Brindepest. It makes sense. And because I mentioned ancient Rome, I also have to then attribute the fall of the Roman Empire to Rinderpest in this episode. Of course. You know, we haven't gotten to do that in a while on this podcast. We really haven't. It's about being time. It is thought, I mean, you know, this might be less of a stretch than the other ones, not Rinderpest, but at least the invasion of the Huns into Rome along with the Goths is thought to be one of the major contributors to the fall of the Roman Empire.

according to some source that I read. And so basically Rinderpest became this enormously dreaded disease because its arrival in a region meant that the next few months to years would be extremely difficult. There was economic devastation, loss of an important food source, loss of crucial materials. If something, anything, had the slightest chance of reducing the disease or preventing it spread, people tried it out. So people had long recognized the contagiousness of the disease, so they would slaughter cows that appeared infected, et cetera, but no cure could be found that was

effective, but that didn't stop people from trying. It's outrageous ancient cures time, Erin. Yes, another thing we haven't done in far too long. This is just full of everything we love. It is. Okay, so we already know about the practice of covering the cow and cucumbers. That didn't work. Well, in ancient Egypt, you were also advised to cut the cow's tail and nose and cover its eyes with burnt linen. What? I'm just reading what I read.

Just cut, like, cut their tail off or just, like, put a little cut in it? You cut it to bleed it. Okay. That's weird. All right. Uh-huh. I mean, of course. And in ancient Rome, a preventative was to,

quote, give to the cattle a mixture of salt, laura leaves, onions, cloves of garlic, incense, powdered rue, and burning charcoal made up with a little wine. Just a little cocktail. A little quarantine. And if that didn't work and a cow became infected, then you, quote, make it swallow an egg whole and then the next day give a clove of garlic beaten up in wine.

I don't know how you make a cow swallow an egg hole. A chicken egg or like what, I mean, be more specific here. Yeah, I guess there's a lot of loopholes in these ancient cures. Mm-hmm. We do a quail egg. Could be a quail. A fish egg, I don't know. Ostrich egg?

And then, of course, purgatives and bleeding were super popular cures. A whole market around snake oil cures for mender pests sprung up. So one of these from 18th century. Germany was like a bacon and flax enema for the cow. Little bits of bacon. You put up the cows, but after it's had its whole like diarrheal fest. With also flax and bacon, that is. And then if it became constipated, you put an apple up there, a small apple.

A small apple, not a large apple. No, no, just a small apple. Do you cut it up first or do you just? No, no, no. Of course not. You would diminish its curative powers that way. You wouldn't want to break the skin. Oh, goodness. Okay. For constipation, that'll do it. Oh, yeah, for sure. Cool. No. And if these preventatives or cures didn't work, and they never did, ever, they never did, there was always prayer and ritual. And so sometimes cattle were branded with a cross between the eyes. Sometimes the head of the first cow to die was cut off and then displayed.

Or a cow skull was buried under the house for those were all widespread practices. Okay. And other times there were slightly more elaborate rituals to protect a village from Rinderpest. Until the late 1800s, people didn't know what caused Rinderpest, and theories ranged from the typical myasma to punishment by God to maybe witchcraft. And outbreaks of Rinderpest were often accompanied by accusations of witchcraft and many villages employed annual rituals to protect them from the disease. So I want to read to you a couple of these rituals from Russia because I think it's so fascinating. Like they're intricate and specific. Okay. So first, confine all the

the men and cattle and make sure they don't escape. Together? It didn't mention that, so maybe not as specific as I was hailing it to be. Okay, all right, they're confined. And then the women should wear their shifts and let their hair down. Then the oldest woman should be yoked to a plow, which is then drawn around the village three times, while the rest of the women follow behind her carrying shovels and tongs and sing.

You make the oldest woman yoke around the town three times. Uh-huh. Alone? Well, she's followed by the rest of the women in the village. Are they helping hold the thingy? I think they are. I think they are. I would hope.

I would hope. Alternatively, still with the men and cattle locked up, old women with fur, like the tree, fir, tree, torches, circled a widow who was naked with a horse collar around her neck. Right. And then they had to go to each farm yard and cry out, aye, aye, cut Hugh the cow death. There she goes. And if a cat or a dog ran out, that was taken to be the cattle plague, like the spirit of the cattle plague, and it was killed. So is this not witchcraft?

That's what I was thinking, too. I'm like a lot of these rituals that like protect the village from witchcraft sound a lot like witchcraft. Right. Like what people would think of as witchcraft. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know either. But like a naked lady in a field being surrounded by burning fire torches sounds a lot like what I think of as.

Like that is what practical magic has led me to believe witchcraft is. It really is. That's my touch point. And then this was the song. that was often sung to get the plague to leave. Death, O thou cow death. Depart from our village. From the stable, from the court,

through our village goes holy Vlasi, which is the saint who was like the protector of Rinderpest. With incense, with taper, with burning embers. Come not to our village. Metal not with our cows. Nut brown, chestnut, star-browed, white-teded, white-uttered, crumpled horned, one-horned. You sing that.

Now can you sing that? Seeing that in Russian for us? I cannot. And throughout Europe, you know, this wasn't restricted to Russia. Throughout Europe, fire festivals were often held to try to protect villages. And a lot of these included just marching the cattle in a certain direction around a fire. Fire festivals. Fire festivals. I know I had to put that in there.

Fire festivals. And these cattle protection or purification rituals were not restricted to Russia and Europe, of course. So for example, in Western Africa, Fulani pastoralist would often build an arch of the mimosa tree and drive the cattle through them as a protective measure. But in some of these rituals, however, the opposite of the desired effect was achieved. So for instance, if you're gathering all the cattle in the village together to then march around the fire, there's going to be more interaction. There's going to be more potential transmission. And one of the other practices was that priests would travel from farm to farm to bless the cattle. And then that often ended up being basically transmitting the disease from farm to farm. So this wide variety of cures, as well as how

geographically distributed they were, shows just how important this disease was considered to be. But let's put some numbers to that. So, Aaron, you talked about the extremely high mortality rate. So we already know, in theory, how devastating it could be. Right. And often the death toll was made worse by those secondary bacterial infections or by the very common practice of slaughtering a herd to try to prevent its spread. So like the preemptive killing, even if a cow was suspected to be sick, it was often killed. Culling the herd.

Culling the herd. All right. So let's check out Rinderpest in Europe in the 18th century, during which time there was essentially a panzoatic, like a pandemic. but for animals. Between 1711 and 1769, an estimated 100 million cattle in Europe died from Rinderpest. Whoa. In like 50 years.

And by the end of that century, so from 1711 to 1800, it was around 200 million cattle that had died. Which is like, imagine the economic toll. Imagine the loss of food. Oh, my goodness. Uh-huh. And in India and other parts of Asia, cattle deaths would run into the hundreds of thousands every single year. Basically, up until the time when like vaccination became more widespread and available. I mean, it was, it's really bad.

So if your livelihood was livestock, you could go from wealthy or comfortable or surviving to abject poverty within 10 days as Rinderpest swept through your heart. heard. And you would think that given this much time, the disease may have decreased in lethality a bit in those places where it had been endemic for a very long time. But it didn't really seem to all that much, or at least as much as you would expect, which is very interesting. So for instance, that panzoatic in Europe in the 18th century, that had an overall mortality rate of around 90%. Wow. Yeah. And certainly in some parts, it wasn't as deadly or certain breeds of cattle or oxen were more resistant, but still, like, not great.

Yeah. This was like the black death or smallpox of cows, and its extreme lethality. Of course, earned it the name that we call it today, Rinderpest, which is German for cattle plague, like I said. By the late 19th century, Rinderpest had been a feared disease for centuries and that fear had led to strict policies about cattle movement and importation being implemented all over Europe and Asia to try to prevent these outbreaks. But obviously, they didn't always work. And soon, the world would see the devastation that Rinderpest could cause when released into an immunologically

naive population of susceptible hosts. Oh no. Yeah. Up to this point, so up to the late 19th century, Rinderpest in Africa had been limited to the Nile River Valley, with occasional outbreaks. occurring from trade with Europe and the Middle East. But its movement south of that area had been restricted, fortunately. But that all changed when in 1887 or 1888, infected cattle were brought to Ethiopia by an Italian military campaign who was invading to try to take control. And what followed would be one of the most devastating panzoatics ever to be witnessed. From Ethiopia, Rinderpass spreads south rapidly, leaving corpses in its wake.

And I have another quote here, and I have a few more quotes in this section because I couldn't resist. Give them to me. Never before in the memory of man, or by the voice of tradition, have the cattle died in such vast numbers. Never before has the wild game suffered. Nearly all the buffalo and inland are gone. The giraffe has suffered, and many of the small antelopes, the bushbuck and reed buck, I believe. leave especially. That was from Lugard in 1893. East Africa fell victim to the cattle plague. Its enormous herds of wild ungulates and cattle

herded by the Maasai, nearly all killed. South Africa watched helplessly as Rinderpest continued its spread and was given a brief reprieve when it was temporarily stopped by the Zambizi River. But it wouldn't hold for long. And in March 1896, the cattle plagued cross the Zambezi and basically sealed the fate of the entire continent. In some parts of the continent, Rinderpest arrived alongside a severe drought, like really, a really horrible one, followed by late rains, which led to huge swarms of locusts that ate all the crops. And when the rains did finally come,

they arrived in such intensity that the crops that had survived the drought and the locusts and the rats and the caterpillars were destroyed. Oh, my. The loss of cattle and crops brought on an extreme famine, and in East Africa there was still one more horseman of the apocalypse to arrive. This time in the form of a massive smallpox epidemic that swept across the region. Are you kidding, dude? No, I know. It is awful, just devastating.

The loss of human life from famine, from smallpox, from Other diseases that were happening was incredible, with an estimated death toll of up to one-half to two-thirds of the population in parts of East Africa. What? Yep. And the death toll of livestock and wildlife was something no one had witnessed before. Across the continent, an estimated 80 to 90% of cattle, buffalo, eelin, giraffe, wildebeest, couto, and antelopes die. like of all of them, not just of the ones infected, but like of all of them. In South Africa alone, about two and a half million cattle died within a couple of years.

Even though the great African panzoatic, which was 1887 to 1897, even though it occurred after the development of germ theory, help arrived too late to do much. So a team largely composed of veterinarians had started in 1880s. to try to develop an immune serum as a treatment, and Robert Koch arrived that same year to work on a vaccine. Oh, and a side note that I forgot to mention earlier, veterinary education and veterinary schools were started in large part due to Rinderpest and trying to understand, yeah. I did not know that. Isn't that cool?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Robert Koch discovered that the bile from an infected ox was generally non-infective and could actually induce immunity to Rinderpest, but it also wasn't perfect and ended up causing a certain degree of death or active infection, which was, of course, problematic. Giving both immune serum and virulent blood did seem to work, however, to produce longer-term immunity. But in any case, these methods of immunization arrived a bit too late to have any effect on the Great African panzootic, but they were helpful in advancing veterinary knowledge and slowing down future outbreaks.

So this massive outbreak kind of more or less just died out on its own after there were no more susceptible animals to perpetuate the disease. And the impact wasn't just that it killed millions upon millions of cattle and wild ungulates and led to widespread famine and poverty. It also had an incredible amount of cascading effects, both sociopolitically and ecological. and in many, many other parts of life. And I want to talk about those. I want to do a little bit of a magnifying glass on some of those because I think this is where it gets very connections-y. You get to see like the widespread implications of a pandemic or a panzoatic.

So as in many other places, cattle played an extremely important role in the daily life for many people in Africa. They served as a food source, but also as plow animals for land-colonautics. cultivation, travel and transport of goods, materials for the goods themselves. So like cow hides uses clothing, sleeping mats, leather, etc. Dung was used as fertilizer or as a fuel for heating. And this last bit, dung as fuel for heating, became especially important at the end of the 19th century when the European colonial rule was kind of booming.

And they had taken over forests and commercialized them, outlawing the collecting of wood for fires. Oh, right. Gracious. So, yep. Cattle also played a huge role in trade and as a form of currency. They were often used in arranging marriages and also as a punishment. If you committed a crime, you may have had to pay in cattle. And so the death of 90 to 100 percent of your cattle herd for many people meant instant poverty and no food. The Rinderpest Pansawatta came at a time when European countries were scrambling for control over the continent, particularly the southern

half of the continent, and many countries were already under European rule, but these colonial governments were always afraid of an uprising and did whatever they could to stomp out any signs of rebellion. In European reports at the time, there was a belief that the massive loss of cattle would lead to unrest and rebellion, and so they decided to arm themselves heavily to preempt any signs of an attack. What? I know. That's the reaction?

Oh, dear. So when Rinderpest began killing cattle, early rumors began circulating that the Rinderpest was a deliberate poisoning by white European colonists. According to reports from the time, it actually does seem that the cattle owned by Africans died at a much higher rate than those owned by Europeans. And while Europeans may not have been deliberately poisoning the cattle, there is a lot of evidence that shows that they used Rinderpest as an opportunity for further oppression. For instance, prior to the Panzoatic, there had been, you know, in these reports like this huge complaints about a shortage in laborers to work in mines or other European-headed industries.

And Rinderpest coming to wipe out the livelihoods of so many Africans was viewed as a blessing in disguise by Europeans. Oh. Yeah. Because with no cattle to rely on, they had to find money elsewhere, such as in the mines. That was sometimes the only option left. Why can humans be so evil to other humans? Like, I just... It gets worse.

Oh, it always does, Aaron. It always does. It gets worse and worse. In the midst of the panzoatic, the mine owners were like, we're going to use this time to reduce the wages by 30% and increase. hours that somebody had to work. I... Quote. From the...

Okay, so this is a quote by the president of the mine managers association. The natives here have to work because they cannot obtain food otherwise, and therefore, I think we have a splendid opportunity to bring this change into operation. That was about reducing the pay and increasing the hours. I... Oh, my God. I... I know.

I have one more... God. I have one more quote because just to further illustrate the outlook of a lot of people who were in charge at the time. Quote, the ravages of the Rinderpest, although reducing the natives to poverty, have not been without beneficial results. And the native has now learnt humility to those to whom he is subordinate, and also the lesson that by work only can he live. And having learnt to work, he is now a happy and contented man, instead of the discontented, indolent, lazy, and busy and besotted being he was when the numerous cattle he possessed provided his every want. There is so much there to just boil your blood.

I know. Yeah. It was, what it was, was seen as this opportunity to decrease self-reliance of those that they wanted to subjugate and oppress. Right. And because if they're not working for you, then they're just lazy, lazy slabs. you know, just hurting cattle because that's just like the easiest thing to do. Yeah, I mean, it really is revealing about the mindsets of and the priorities of the people who were in charge at this time.

Wow. Yep. And so European colonists further exploited Rinderpest to impoverish Africans, such as in South Africa. Like when only Africans had to be dipped in a solution of carbolic soap at quarantine stations, But not white Europeans. This is to try and quote combat Rinderpest, supposedly? Uh-huh. Oh, no.

Well, and Rinder Pest was claimed to be spread only by wagons owned or ridden by Africans so that only their movements were restricted, which meant no trade opportunities, deepening their poverty. That's logical. And then there was the fencing land. So fences were put up to try to restrict cattle movement and create cordons, cattle would not interact, but fencing has long been recognized as a way to, as paving the way for colonial incorporation and land alienation. And then there was the militarization of the South

African government's anti-Rinder pest campaign, which placed armed guards along fences and quarantine stations. And finally, you know, one of the biggest problems with this Rinder Pest epidemic was that the only epidemiological control measures that were employed were extremely crude. I mean, there was no really other way to do it. You either had to kill the cattle that were infected or suspected to be infected, or you create these cordons, like I mentioned, to restrict movement. But of course, there was no compensation if you had to slaughter your cattle. And so farmers often hid infected cattle, which worsened the outbreak. And then the slaughter of cattle itself also carried some very problematic aspects, since it was

usually a white veterinarian going out to tell these black farmers that, hey, I know best. Mm-hmm. Right? I know best. I'm here to kill all your cattle. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And with no compensation and rob you of your livelihood.

It's fine. You'll work in the mines. Don't worry about it. It's fine. Yep. Yeah. You'll be fine. This is good for you.

And, you know, there were times where it appeared that the preemptive slaughter of cattle was extreme and designed to impoverish the owners and drive them to the labor market and increase their dependence on the colonial state. And then there was the aspect of missionaries who would seize upon this opportunity to show those that they were trying to convert, that their sins and refusal to follow whatever religion they were preaching had led to this plague upon their country. cattle. So it's like, let me strip you of your culture and of your livelihood and of any food and security and so on. And then this way, I'll have complete control over you. It's your fault, by the way, because you didn't free to the right God. Right. You brought this on. Way to go. So yes. So Rinderpest was exploited for further exploitation and subjugation of so many of the peoples of Africa. By 1896, almost all African communities had lost their independence.

And I think it's reasonable to say that this period, the combination of Rinderpest and drought and smallpox definitely played a role in that. Yeah. All right. So now let's shift to the ecological side of things. Just like depressing on depressing. Like, yeah. It is, it's depressing on depressing.

I think for the sociopolitical part, we can look at it as like, hey, let's remember how this happened and never do this again and identify when people are trying to do this and make the future better. Yeah. And for the ecological side of things, I think this is a very fascinating lesson in how interconnected, of course, an ecological landscape can be. Yeah. So, okay. So this sheer loss of wildlife was on a scale that could barely be believed. I barely believe it. One more quote. The buffalo were chiefly affected and they had come down to the river in thousands to die. Apparently, when attacked by the disease, they had become consumed by thirst and so congregated at the river, which provided the only water supply for many miles.

It was a tragic sight to see all these great creatures dead and dying. The stench was nauseating and one could not have believed that there were so many. carry-in birds in Africa as were collected for the feast. Upon our arrival at Ingomeni, we found the people in a terrible state of depression for the Rinderpest epidemic had recently attacked their cattle. This area had, up to then, been probably richer in cattle than most of the Canba country. The fell disease had spread with such rapidity that the disposal of the carcasses of the cattle was a task beyond their powers, and the desiccated remains of tens of thousands of beasts were piled up in the form of a wall, a few yards from the villages. and the air night and day was pervaded by a sickly odor of putrefaction.

The people appeared to be overcome with a hopeless apathy, and the elders sadly produced a small bunch of about 20 head, the sole survivors of the great herds. That's from 1891, written by Hobley. The death of so many animals had incredible cascading effects on the ecosystem. And I found a paper that traced these impacts by closely examining an area in the Serengeti after Rinderpest had been eliminated. And so in this region, 95% of the cattle, buffalo, and wildebeest populations died during the Panzawatic.

Here's the Cascade. First came the massive die-offs of game animals, livestock, and human populations. After a brief boom period where prey mortality was super high, predator populations declined when they could find no more food to eat. And then there came reports of lions, leopards, jackals, hyenas, other predators, attacking humans and dragging them off to be eaten. Scavenger population stayed pretty high throughout this whole experience. Without livestock and wild ungulates to browse and graze, fires then rapidly increased due to the excess of tinder, and they grew to such high levels that they destroyed trees that would become part of the canopy, turning wooded areas into savannah grasslands.

Alternatively, what happened in some other places was that the death of browsers, like giraffes, that would keep those seedlings and saplings small enough to be killed by fire, had almost all died. And so then the canopy first grew and then became overcrowded, resulting again in self-thinning and an even more open canopy in arid areas, is what would happen, and then a more closed woodland in wetter areas. Whoa. These heavily shaded woodland areas helped along the recovery of some game animals, and that led to a recovery also in the Tisi-Fly populations, which made it extremely difficult for humans to resettle in those places.

Yeah, so Rinderpest is often linked to the decline of Trapanosomiasis, and then as soon as animal populations rebounded, so did Trapanosomiasis and Tisi-Fly populations. Yeah. Oh, my gracious. Mm-hmm. Depopulation of humans in Lake Victoria Basin. and then a resistance to move back in due to tropanasomyasis may have led to elephants to moving into these areas of the park. And then as the ecosystem there has recovered and humans have once again moved into that space, it creates this conflict between humans and elephants. Recovery of wildebeest and browser populations since the elimination of Rinderpest has led to a decrease in fires now because more grassland is being eaten from 100% of the grasslands in the north being burned after the panzoatic to 25% in the recovery years.

The recovery of wildebeest has also changed the range sizes of smaller grazers like gazelles and zebras. When wildebeest populations were low, those smaller grazers had smaller grazers. ranges because they didn't have to travel as far to find food. But now that the Wilderbeast are back, researchers are finding that they now have to go and travel even more extensively to find grazing. Oh, man. Since the elimination of Rinterpest, the lion and the hyena populations have steadily increased. But on the other hand, and I find this fascinating, the African wild dog population has decreased due to canine distemper. And it has been suggested. Yep. Yep. The increase in canine distemper might be due to the elimination of Rinderpest because dogs, these African wild dogs, may have gotten partial immunity by eating Rinderpest infected flesh of those ungulates.

Oh, my goodness. We're going to talk more about that later. Oh. Yeah. So cool. So Rinderpest reshaped the landscape of so many parts of Africa, and its eradication is allowed. allowing us to get a glimpse of what it was like before the disease swept through. It's very interesting. I don't know if it'll go back to what it once was. Probably not. So many other things have changed. But it's really interesting. It is. That is really fascinating. It's incredible that it had such wide-ranging effects. You know what I mean? Like literally changing the physical landscape. Like, physical landscape, the social landscape, the political landscape.

I mean, it's really, it's one of the, this is why I say it's like the smallpox of cattle. The great African panzoatic of Renderpest was not the last time that Rinderpest would be an issue. Not there, not in the rest of the world, not by a long shot. Throughout the 20th century, outbreaks continued to occur and the disease also popped up in Brazil. until after infected cattle were imported, but nowhere else in North or South America. Okay. The development of an effective vaccine and large-scale immunization campaigns led to the last big outbreaks occurring periodically in the first half of the 20th century and then turning

into small, more isolated instances with a few larger epidemics into the 80s. The last confirmed case of Rinderpest was reported in Kenya in 2001. And on May 25th, 2011, Rinderpest was declared. declared to be the second disease eradicated. Wow. Yeah. Why did it take 10 years before they declared it eradicated? Were they just like waiting and surveilling to make sure?

Yeah, that's what I can tell, is that they just kept, because I would imagine because it's different than in human eradication. Like even with human, there was a delay. Yeah, right. But the surveillance, I think, is easier than with, you know, these massive herds of wild on guillots that don't readily come to, you know, immunization stations. Right. You can't just call their doctor's office and be like, yeah. Any cases of Rinderbest this year? No, great. Well, Aaron, that's all I've got for the history. Oh, wow. So, wow,

it ended. It ended. I know. I breeze through the whole vaccine things because I just was like, I wanted to focus on the panzoatic. Okay. Well, great. We'll talk a little bit. We'll talk a little bit. about the vaccine then, that's great. Awesome. All right, so catch me up. What's going on now with this eradicated disease? I'd love to. We'll take a quick break first.

Okay. So we've eradicated rinder pest. We have. Which means we don't have to worry about it anymore, technically. And like you mentioned, Aaron, while this is now a virus that exists only in laboratory stocks, many labs, including in 2019, a UK lab that had the largest stocks of Rinderpest virus, has destroyed their stocks. So in theory, if everyone destroyed their stocks, this virus would be eliminated from the earth, which is great. Let's hope that that happens.

It's really, really interesting that it appears that, in fact, with one of these morbilloviruses, for example, measles, actually confers protection to all the other groups of morbilloviruses for the most part. Which is super cool. Yeah, there was a study where they injected a cow with a measles vaccine, and then that cow didn't get rinder pest when they challenged it. So, like, you could, you could have protected cows with the measles vaccine instead of the rinder pest vaccine, in theory. So there is not just a potential increase in canine distemper virus, I actually didn't even read about that in wild dogs. That's fascinating. There's another ungulate morbillivirus that is the PPR. Pest de Petit Ruminant virus.

I just think like little cute little ruminants. Cute little ruminant plague. Okay. So this is a very closely related to render pest virus that causes disease in sheep. and goats. It does not appear to cause disease in cattle or other ungulents, even though it is possible that they can get infected, at least experimentally. But they don't tend to have clinical disease, even if they could potentially then transmit it. So there has been an increase in PPR spread documented since the eradication of RPV, Rindipas virus. And because the surveillance systems for RPV were so in place already, we've been able to actually detect this where we might not have otherwise. That's very interesting. Right? Yeah.

And so it's thought that it is this eradication of RPV and not just the eradication, but the cessation of the vaccination campaigns, which had to happen in order to like finish the eradication campaign of Rinderpest virus. They actually stopped vaccinating early. So, that they could detect if there were outbreaks. Mm-hmm. And so it's thought that that cessation of vaccination meant no more protection, even in cattle, from PPR. So then that facilitated the spread.

Isn't that fascinating? That is very fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about some of the lessons that we can learn about this eradication, especially because since Rinderpest is so close to. related to measles virus. It shares a lot of commonalities. A lot of people, and there are several papers that kind of say, what lessons can we learn from the Rinder Pest eradication that we could

maybe apply to trying to eradicate measles? So a few things really facilitated the eradication efforts to actually kind of come to fruition, right? First is that we had a really good vaccine. So I didn't dig into the history of how this vaccine was developed. It was made in cows, I know. It was a live attenuated vaccine. And here are some of the things that were really great about it. First is it was extremely effective in a single dose. It was never associated with any adverse reactions, supposedly.

And one single dose in a cow was immunogenic and provided essentially life. long immunity. Wow. And that's all that it took. That's the unicorn. Right? It's a unicorn vaccine. But the very first vaccine, the biggest challenge with it was that it was a live virus

vaccine, which meant that it required cold storage. And it had to always be transported in cold storage in order to be effective, essentially, right, to keep it alive. So eventually they developed a shelf-stable formulation. and that was honestly super important in these eradication efforts because it meant that you could keep it, I think, for one month at like ambient temperatures. And that means that you could transport it a lot more easily, even in places where you didn't have access to refrigeration.

Another thing that became really essential in the eradication efforts was involvement of community stakeholders. And I think that that makes a lot of sense in the context of the history that we just heard about, right? this is a disease that historically was very fraught politically, right, and caused a lot of issues. And so eventually people figured out that you couldn't just have veterinarians come in and kind of take over and tell people what they had to do with their cattle herds, right? That didn't work very well. So eventually they involved community-based animal health care workers, and that proved to be really essential. So training people from the community to be able to go out and give these vaccines essentially rather than relying on government vaccination programs.

Awesome. Yeah. And then the last thing was good epidemiological or epizoological studies to monitor, surveil, and model what outbreaks could look like to be able to get a handle on, you know, surveillance and reducing the overall spread. And so some of these things we can do for humans, and some of them are a little bit more difficult, right? So with surveillance in cattle, once you would identify in a population, quarantine, and vaccination, or in some cases, culling of the herd, would be effective in reducing the spread of that illness. With human diseases like measles, that's a lot more difficult to do, right? not only because you can't call humans. Oh my God.

Erin. Sorry. Do I have to say that? I don't know. But it's more difficult to quarantine humans for so many reasons. But we also just move a lot more than cattle do, right? Cattle are, we put them in herds and that's kind of where they remain. It's a little bit more complicated with wildlife that come in and out.

But with humans, we can get on a plane and travel, and now measles is in three different countries. So it's a lot easier in that way to target an animal disease like this. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible. And I think especially this like shelf-stable vaccine, which as far as I know we still don't have for measles, it still is a cold storage vaccine. And involvement of community stakeholders, I think are the things that are going to be most important in trying to eradicate any human illness. And I think these are lessons that we can learn from Rinder Pest. Perfect. I loved it. I loved it. Well, I for one, I'm very glad that we, A, did this episode, and B, that Render Pest is eradicated.

Oh, same. Man. Okay. All right. It's time for sources? I guess so. Sources. So I relied on a few different sources, and I'll post all of these on this podcast will kill you.com website. I read Cattle Plague, A History by CA Spinage. One of the other ones that I really liked was a book called Rinderpest and PPR Virus Plagues of Large and Small Ruminants. Erin, that's the book I used.

It's so good. Yeah, I saw that you had downloaded it and I was like, all right, because I had downloaded it separately and then I was like, oh, wait, it's in there twice. Okay. Yeah, it's good. It had so much information. Yeah, it was really phenomenal. And there are two more that I want to briefly shout out. One is by McNaughton in 1992, the propagation of disturbance in savannas through food webs.

And finally, by Fufolo, 1993, Epidemics and Revolutions, the Rinderpest Epidemic in late 19th century, Southern Africa. Awesome. Yeah, I loved that book that you recommended. I'm sure we read different chapters. I also used heavily another book that you download. downloaded Aaron. The chapter Rinderpest Virus in the book, we're not going to say the title. It's too long, but it's by Walter Plowright, who's one of the big names in RPV research in general. And then a few papers that we will post on our website, this podcast will kill you.com.

You can find the sources for this episode and every single one of our episodes there. You sure can. Yeah, Walter Plowright was one of the biggest leaders in the eradication campaign, and he died just before. it was declared eradicated. But it was basically, it was in 2010, so he kind of knew. He was like, I did it. We did it. We did it. Anyway, group effort for sure. Thank you to Blubnobio for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes. And thank you listeners for sticking with us. I hope you enjoyed this cattle but not only cattle episode. Yes. Thank you. Thank you always. and until next time, wash your hands. You filthy animals.

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