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 renderpest. 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 road side, 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 nine hundred 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 eight hundred thousand head of cattle, some say nine hundred thousand perished in Comma'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 corps, Bordans and the severest preventative measures, the scourge pursued its course relentlessly.
Whoa, yeah, eight hundred to nine hundred thousand.
Oh that's like in one 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 eighteen ninety seven about the arrival of renderpest in South Africa.
Wow.
Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh.
And I'm Erin alman Updyke.
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, 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 yea, I can't oh oh yeah, so what disease is it?
Erin we're talking about today, We're talking about render pest, which is the German for cattle plague. So it's a disease of cattle. Surprise the rise, but.
Really it's it's as intense as anything you would ever want. Like, if you're like I don't care about cows, you're gonna care about these cows.
So Erin, what are we drinking for a render pest?
We are drinking utter delight, goodness.
Excellent, another milky one erin.
It's like milky, but not milky milky, you know.
Sure, so it's milk emy okay exactly.
This is basically a pinacolada, 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 in tolerant, like our friend Katie, you can use something else besides coconut ice.
Cream, like those coconut cream ice creams that they have.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, those are good, They're very good.
And we'll post the full recipe for this quarantini as well as our non alcoholic plus e Brita on our website, this podcast will kill you, dot 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. Fifty two episodes fifty keep counting.
We're starting to keep track again.
Yeah, for like another episode until I forget.
Awesome? Aaron. 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. 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 longtime listeners. Okay, Okay, I think I know why you do know why you are so so. Render pest is the disease caused by render pest virus RPV, which is in the genus morbili virus, which happens to be the same family of viruses as
one of our favorite human pathogens, measles. Don't know, so I'm gonna 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 Morbili viruses. PPR or pest de pity 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 distemps. And then there are also a lot of marine Morbila viruses 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 cor marine transmission of infectious disease.
Yeah, okay, so speaking of transmission, much like measles. Rinderpest virus is a highly infectious virus. It's spread I saw reports that it spread via the respiratory route, 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.
Yeah, 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 Ardiodactyla, which is the even toed ungulates. I had to google a lot about ungulates Aaron just to do this episode.
I love ungulates.
I had no idea that there was even toad ungulates and odd toed ungulates. Didn't know that was a thing. Oh yeah, you knew that already.
Well, just kept from camera trapping and having to do all.
The 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 zebu, hippos, gazelle's impalas, the greater kudoo, or rix or reebe wart, hogs, pigs, goats, sheep, pretty much all of the ungulates except the odd toad ones,
which are horses, zebras, rhinoceroses, and tape heirs. Okay, cool, all right, But one thing that's really important is that although render pest 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 first hand accounts of that, yeah, that I'll 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 these 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 tissue that are called Pyre's 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 incubation prodrome, mucosal phase which is sometimes combined with the diarrheal phase, and then the convalescent phase parentheses.
Or death which the or death is.
Not getting.
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 renderpest 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 eleven or even fifteen days if it's a less virulent strain, but in general three to nine days.
Do these strains have any pattern in geographical distribution? Render press virus comes from Asia, so are strains less virulent there is?
That?
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 wildebeast, but then le 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 prodromal phase. The prodrome we've talked about a 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. 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 forty one point five C, which is one hundred and six point seven fahrenheit.
What is the normal body temperature for Oh, I'm.
So glad that you ask, because I looked it up. I found one paper. This was looking at Gemsbock and will Deebeast. So for them, the average body temperature varied depending on environmental conditions between thirty seven point five and thirty nine C. So that's ninety nine point five fahrenheit and one oh two point two 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, so, I mean, but still it's render pest.
So it's been 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 temperature range of one hundred and two one hundred and six is four full fahrenheit degrees higher than that, that's pretty that's high.
Yeah, no, it's it's definitely a high fever.
So anyways, so then this pro drummal 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 becomes shallow and more rapid, and then their mucous membranes start to get congested with secretions, so their mouth, their nose, their eyes start having purulent secretions coming out of them. Sounds pretty terrible, pretty terrible.
And that's just the pro drum stage.
Just stage two, Just stage two. 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 pin head 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 pathandomonic for measles in humans.
It's exactly what I was gonna say. I totally had those those words right there. I haven't forgotten that at all.
You did, remember, though, mesos.
That's pretty cool, only because they're like very similar. I like diazels those spots.
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 see those spots and being like.
Oh God, God terrified.
Yeah, knowing what's ahead of you is horrible, 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 separate it out, tends to start about four to five days after the onset of fever, 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 maculo popular 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 utters or in the groin or the axilla, 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 sternam 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 fourteen 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 ok their most infectious.
Okay, So in the mucosal phase, the.
Mucosal and diarrheal phase, Yeah, and that diarrhea full of virus.
I was gonna say, yeah, well, I was just imagining being a vet before you knew what renderpest was and how it was transmitted, and walking and your boots in one farm and going to the next farm, lokin 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 forty eight 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. M 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 happen 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.
Eff absolutely absolutely. Speaking of long term effects, you remember in our measles episode, we talked about how much measles rex our immune system.
Uh huh, immune amnesia m hm.
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. Render pest also absolutely reaks havoc on the immune system of
these animals. So it's very common that even if an animal survives render pest 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 in affects 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 it's really really depressing. Overall mortality rates are often over ninety percent, approaching one hundred percent.
It's unreal. Yeah, I mean, it's very real, but it's hard to believe.
I know, it's absolutely horrific. That's 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?
Uh, we eradicated it.
Yeah, it's the second disease to be eradicated ever in the history of diseases. It's so cool.
It's very cool, very cool. So this disease no longer exists in the wild, in domestic animals, it doesn't exist except in laboratory vials.
Yeah, and a lot of labs, not all, but some have destroyed their.
Which is thrilling. So yeah, So Aaron, what the heck?
I can't wait to tell you.
I can't. 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. Even though render pest is highly related to measles, as you mentioned, I think that one appropriate comparison is that render 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 replaced 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. But yeah, so, as you talked about, Aaron, render pest 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 render pest? 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 render pest may have evolved with bovines since the Pleistocene, so like two million to twelve thousand 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 enlarge enough populations, render pest jump species and evolved into the measles virus, maybe five to seven thousand years ago, maybe as recently as the eleventh century. If you want to hear more, listen to our measles episode.
Render past probably had its geographical origins in Asia and was probably restricted to that part of the world until around three hundred and seventy 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 render passed, dating back to three thousand BCE describing an ill bull with labored breathing, running eyes, inflamed gums, and a swollen neck, and the treatment was either to submerge the bowl and 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're to cool.
It down 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 bull?
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 is a line from Exodus. This is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews 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 twenty forty eight BCE, but it's debated whether that's actually
render pest. 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 I said, anthrax. But usually you can tell between an anthrax epidemic and a renderpest epidemic in like historical texts. If the descriptions are of just cattle being affected, then
it's probably render 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 three hundred and seventy current era, the Huns began their invasion of your starting in the southeast. They brought with them gray steppe oxen, which happened to be remarkably resistant to render pest, so about a twenty five percent mortality rate instead of the ninety five to two one hundred
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 render pest led to the deaths of nearly all the cattle in Europe around this time, especially Southeast Europe YEP. And this plague raged for nearly ten years from three seventy six to three eighty six
current era, impacting Rome, Belgium, Hungary, Austria, France, et cetera. Wow, it was big, yeah, And from this first epidemic, the disease basically 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. So 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 renderpest kind of slowly spread throughout the rest of Europe, finally reaching England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales
around six ninety four. To seven oh seven current era wo 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 render pest 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 render pest epidemic following the invasion of the Huns started a long long period of render pest 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 render pest 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. Syna get congregation.
They congregate. Oh gosh, double triple whammy. Man, Oh yeah, oh yeah.
And another pattern was that rinderpest became known as the 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 then 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 or 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 wo So, for example, Charlemagne's campaigns in Central Europe around eight hundred CE were slowed down by rinderpest. Quote so great was the pestilence of oxen in this expedition that scarcely 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 horizon in wrinderpest 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. Well, you know, we haven't gotten to do that in a while on this.
We really haven't. But it is time it is thought, I mean it. You know, this might be less of the stretch than the other ones. Not render Pest, but at least the invasion of the Huns into Rome, along with the goth 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, render pest 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 its outrageous ancient cures time eras.
Another thing we haven't done in far too long. This is 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 an 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, little cattle quarantiny. 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. They shake cures a quail egg. It could be a quail 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 winterpest sprung up. So one of these from eighteenth 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 with fust.
Also flax and bacon, that is.
And then 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?
No? No, no, of course not. You would diminish its curative powers that way.
I 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 cowskull 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 render pest.
Until the late eighteen hundreds, people didn't know what caused render pest, and theories ranged from the typical miasma to punishment by God to maybe witchcraft. And outbreaks of renderpest 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
their intricate and specific. Okay, so first, confine all the men and cattle and make sure they don't escape together. Or 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 you're she's followed by the rest of the women in.
The or are they helping hold the thing?
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 fur tree torches circled a widow who was naked with a horse collar around her neck, right, and then they had to go to each farmyard and cry out, I 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, like like what people would think of as witchcraft. I don't.
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 Witchcrest is.
So 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, Oh thou cow death, depart from our village, from the stable, from the court, through our village goes Holy Flassy, which is the saint who was like the protector of rinderpest. With incense, with taper, with burning embers, come not to our village, meddle, not with our cows nut brown chestnut, star browed, white, teeated, white, uttered, crumpled, horned,
one horned. You sing that, but.
That's using 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 pastoralists 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 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 renderpest in Europe in the eighteenth century, during which time there was essentially a panzuotic like a
pandemic but for animals. Between seventeen eleven and seventeen sixty nine and estimated one hundred million cattle in Europe died from winder pest whoa in like fifty years and by the end of that century, so from seventeen eleven to eighteen hundred, it was around two hundred million cattle that had died, which is like, imagine that 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 ten days
as renderpest swept through your herd. Oh god. 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 seemed to all that much, or at least as much as you would expect, which is very interesting. So for instance, that panzootic in Europe in the eighteenth century that had an overall mortality rate of around ninety percent.
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.
Render pest, which is German for cattle plague. Like I said, by the late nineteenth century, render pest had been a fear 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 render pest could cause when released into an immunal life logically naive population of susceptible hosts.
Oh no, yeah. Up to this point, so, up to the late nineteenth century, render pest in Africa had been limited to the Nile River Valley, with occasional outbreaks occurring from trade with Europe in the Middle East, but its movement south of that area had been restricted fortunately, but that all changed when in eighteen eighty seven or eighteen eighty eight, 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 panzootics ever to be witnessed. From Ethiopia, render past 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 such vast numbers.
Never before has the wild game suffered. Nearly all the buffalo and eland are gone, the giraffe has suffered, and many of the small antelopes, the bushbuck and read book I believe especially it was from Lugard. In eighteen ninety three, East Africa fell victim to the cattle plague. Its enormous herds of wild ungulates and cattle herded by the Massai 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 eighteen ninety six, the cattle plagued crossed the Zambizi and basically sealed the fate of the entire continent. In some parts of the continent, renderpest 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 reins 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 horsemen 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. 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 eighty to ninety percent of cattle, buffalo elan giraffe, wildeb'st kudu, and antelopes died 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 panzolotic which was eighteen eighty seven to eighteen ninety seven, 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 eighteen ninety six 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 know that, isn't that cool? Yeah yeah, yeah.
So Rapercoke discovered that the bile from an infected ox was generally noneffective and could actually induce immunity to render pest, 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 panzawotic, 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 ecologically 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 connection ze you get to see, like the widespread implications of a pandemic or a panzootic. So as in many other places, cattle played an extremely important role in the daily life from many people in Africa. They served as a food source but also as plow animals.
For land cultivation, travel and transport of goods, materials for the goods themselves, so like cowhides used as clothing, sleeping mats, leather, et cetera. Dung was used as fertilizer or as a fuel for heating. And this last bit, dung is fuel for heating, became especially important at the end of the nineteenth 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 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 ninety to one hundred percent of your cattle herd for many people meant instant poverty and no food.
The renderpest Panzawata 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 rebelli and so they decided to arm themselves heavily to preempt any signs of an attack.
Classic I know that's their reaction.
So when renderpists began killing cattle, early rumors began circulating that the render pest 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 render pest as an opportunity for further oppression. For instance, prior to the Panziwotic, there had been in these reports like this, huge complaints about a shortage in laborers to work in mines or other European headed industries, and render pests coming to wipe out the livelihoods of so many Africans 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, it don't there and it always does, It gets worse and worse. In the midst of the Panzolotic the mine owners were like, we're going to use this time to reduce the wages by thirty percent and increase hours that somebody had to work. I quote from the Okay, so this is a quote by the president of the mine Manager's 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 go. 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 renderpest. 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 learned to work, he is now a happy and contented man instead of the discontented, indolent, lazy, and besotted being he was when the numerous cattle he possessed provided his every want.
There is so much there, huh. 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 slobs, you know. Yep, just herting 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 render pests 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 render pest.
Huh huh oh no, well, and render 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 land, so fences were put up to try to restrict to cattle movement and create cordons where 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 renderpest campaign, which placed arm guards along fences and quarantine stations.
And finally, one of the biggest problems with this render 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 you usually a white veterinarian going out to tell these black farmers that, hey, I know best, right.
I know best. I'm here to kill all your cattle, and with no compensation, in Robbie, of your livelihood. It's fine, you'll work in the mines. Don't work, It's fine, 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 cattle.
So it's like, let me strip you of your culture and of your livelihood and of any food and security and 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 right to the right guy.
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 eighteen ninety six, almost all African communities had lost their independence. And I think it's reasonable to say that this period, the combination of renderpest 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. 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 site to see all these great creatures dead and dying.
The stench was nauseating, and one could not have believed that there were so many carrion birds in Africa as were collected for the feast. Upon our arrival at Ngomeni, we found the people in a terrible state of depression, for the renderprest epidemic had recently attacked their cattle. This area had up to then been probably richer in cattle
than most of the Kamba 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 twenty head
the sole survivors of the Great Herds. That's from eighteen ninety one written by Hopey. 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 Serengetti after winderpest had been eliminated, and so in this region, ninety five percent of the cattle, buffalo, and wildeby's populations died during the Panzawatic Here's the cascade. First came the massive die offs of game animals, livestock
in human populations. After a brief boom period where premortality 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 populations stayed pretty high throughout this whole experience without livestock and wild ungulates
to brows and grays. 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 that 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 gay animals, and that led to a recovery also in the tcfly populations, which made it extremely difficult for humans to resettle in those places. Yeah. So, render pest is often linked to the decline of trapanisamiasis, and then as soon as animal populations rebounded, so did trapanasimiasis and tcfly populations.
Yeah, oh my gracious mm hmm.
Depopulation of humans in Lake Victoria basin and then a resistance to move back in due to tripanasamiasis 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 wildebeeste and browser populations since the elimination of rinderpest has led to a decrease in fires now because more grassland is being eaten, from one hundred percent of the grasslands in the north being burned after the Panzawatic to twenty five percent in the recovery years. The recovery of wildebeest has also changed the range sizes of smaller grazers like gazelles and zebras.
When wildebees's populations were low, those smaller grazers had smaller 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 rinder past, 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 yet yet the increase in canine distemper might be due to the elimination of render pest because dogs, these African wild dogs may have gotten partial immunity by eating render pest infected flesh of those ungulates.
Oh my goodness, we're going to talk more about that later.
Oh yeah, so cool. So render pest reshaped the landscape of so many parts of Africa, and it's eradication is 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. So many other things have changed, but it's really interesting.
It is that is really fascinating. It's it's incredible that it had such wide ranging effects, you know what I mean, like literally changing the physical landscape, like.
The physical landscape, the social landscape, the political landscape. I mean, it's it's really it's one of the It's this is why I say it's like the smallpox of cattle, the Great African panzolotic of render pest was not the last time that render pest would be an issue, not there not in the rest of the world, not by a
long shot. Throughout the twentieth century, outbreaks continued to occur, and the disease also popped up in Brazil after infected cattle were imported, but nowhere else in North or South America. 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 twentieth century and then turning into small, more isolated instances with a few larger epidemics
into the eighties. The last confirmed case of render pest was reported in Kenya in two thousand and one, and on May twenty fifth, twenty eleven, render pest was declared to be the second disease eradicated.
Wow, why did it take ten 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 angilas that don't readily come to you know, immunization stations, right, you.
Can't just call their doctor's office. Yeah, any cases of render pest 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 breezed through the whole vaccine things because I just was like, I wanted to focus on the panziwatic.
Okay, well, great, 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 love too.
We'll take a quick break first. Okay, so we've eradicated render 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 twenty nineteen a UK lab that had the largest stocks of renderpest 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 infection with one of these morbiliviruses, for example, measles, actually confers protection to all the other groups of morbiliviruses 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 render pested when they challenged it. So like you could have protected cows with the measles vaccine instead of the render 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 morbilivirus that is the PPR.
Oh, yes, little pit 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 ungulants, 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 renderpest 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 finish the eradication campaign of renderpest virus.
They actually stopped vaccinating early so that they could detect if there were outbreaks m H. 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 fasct It 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 render pest is so closely 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 render 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 like 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 immunogetic and provided essentially lifelong immunity.
Wow, and that's that's what I 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 ke 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 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 healthcare workers and that proved to be really essential, 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 epidymiological or epi zoological 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 cull here humans. Oh my god, Okay, 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 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 Render Pest perfect. I love it well.
I for one, am very glad that we A did this episode and b that renderpest is eradicated. Oh same man, Okay, all right, Time for sources, I guess so sources. So I relied on a few different sources and I'll post all of these on the this podcast will Kill You dot com website. I read Cattle Plague, a history by C. A. Spinach. One of the other ones that I really liked was a book called Renderpest and PPR Virus Plagues of Large and Small ruminants Arian.
That's the book I used.
It's still 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 phenomenon.
And there are two more that I want to briefly shout out. One is by McNaughton in nineteen ninety two, The Propagation of Disturbance and Savannahs through food webs And finally by Fufolo nineteen ninety three, Epidemics and Revolutions the rinderpest epidemic in late nineteenth 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 downloaded Aaron the chapter renderpest 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 dot com. You can find the sources for this episode and every single one of our episodes there.
You sure can.
Yeah.
Walter Plowite 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 twenty ten, so he kind of knew. He was like I did it. We did it, we did it, we did anyway. Group effort for sure. Thank you to Blodmobile 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.