Rinderpest: how the world’s deadliest cattle plague was eradicated

Empire, the French Revolution and famines throughout Africa since the noneteenth century. Indeed, nearly three-quarters of the rural poor and some one-third of the urban poor depend on livestock for their food, income, traction, manure or other services. Livestock provide poor households with up to half their income and between 6 and 35 percent of their protein consumption. The loss of a single milking animal can affect a family’s economic health, while depriving it of a primary source of nutrition.

Road to eradication
The release notes that the first major contributing factor to eradication, as identified by the analysis, was a major improvement made to an existing rinderpest vaccine. While the original vaccine was safe, effective, affordable, and easy to produce, it needed to be refrigerated — making it nearly impossible to transport it to remote rural villages. With the development of a new heat-resistant vaccine formulation in 1990 that could be stored at 37°C for eight months, and in the field without refrigeration for thirty days, scientists had a tool that would become the cornerstone of the eradication effort in remote pastoral areas of Africa.

According to ILRI’s Jeffrey Mariner, however, the analysis’ lead author and inventor of the temperature-stable rinderpest vaccine, it was the role played by pastoralists that really turned rinderpest on its head.

As part of a public-private-community partnership, Mariner and colleagues trained what they called community-based animal health workers, or CAHWs — local pastoralists who were willing to travel on foot and able to work in remote areas — on how to deliver the new vaccine. These CAHWs carried the vaccine from herd to herd, immunizing all the cattle in their communities.

The local herders performed as well, if not better, than did veterinarians at vaccinating the herds — in fact often achieving higher than 80 percent herd immunity in a short time — remarkable for a disease that had plagued most of the world for millennia. Indeed, it turned out that the pastoralists were not only very, very good at delivering the vaccine, but that they also knew more about the disease and how to stop it than many of the experts.

“We soon discovered that the livestock owners knew more than anyone — including government officials, researchers or veterinarians — where outbreaks were occurring,” Mariner said. “It was their expertise about the sizes of cattle herds, their location, seasonal movement patterns and optimal time for vaccination that made it