Cattle plague: An extinction worth celebrating

[muriel_volestrangler]

The world's deadliest cattle disease could be wiped off the face of the planet in the next 18 months, according to a report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Rinderpest, "one of the most devastating animal diseases known to man," according to the FAO, could become only the second disease to be eradicated by humans, following the elimination of smallpox in 1980. Also known as "cattle plague," rinderpest causes high fever, erosions in the mouth and diarrhea, resulting in severe dehydration. Animals die just days after displaying symptoms, and the disease kills nearly 100 percent of those it infects.

Rinderpest outbreaks have been killing cattle and related species throughout Asia, Europe and Africa for millennia, and have changed the course of human history. Famine brought about by rinderpest epidemics in the 18th century fed unrest that led to the French Revolution. The introduction of rinderpest to sub-Saharan Africa at the end of the 19th century wiped out 80-90 percent of the region's cattle, leaving the populace weak from hunger and unable to oppose European colonialism.
...
The efforts paid off. In the past 15 years, 170 countries and territories have been certified as rinderpest-free by the World Organization for Animal Health, the international certification body for animal diseases. The last major outbreak was in Kenya in 2001, and the disease's final stronghold was in a small, overlapping area of Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya that the FAO now says appears to have been cleared.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=cattle-plague-an-extinction-worth-c-2009-11-30

In case someone wanted some good news. :)

[kestrel91316]

1. Wiped out, my ass. Some dick has a stash of it to use for bioterrorism

as soon as we let our guard down.