Speaker 1: But a far more general plague than the smallpox, and
Speaker 1: a much more general scourge than the locusts, suddenly made
Speaker 1: its appearance and dogged our steps. This was the renderpest.
Speaker 1: No one who has not lived in Africa can form
Speaker 1: the least idea of this awful calamity. It mowed down
Speaker 1: the whole bovine race in its passage. Hundreds of carcasses
Speaker 1: lay here and there on the road side, or piled
Speaker 1: up in the fields in vain. Did legions of vultures
Speaker 1: and beasts of prey gather to devour them. They could
Speaker 1: not overtake the quantity, and the carrion lay there putrefying everywhere.
Speaker 1: More than nine hundred wagons loaded with merchandise, without teams
Speaker 1: or drivers, stood abandoned along the Bulawayo road in a
Speaker 1: few weeks a few months, let us say, I am
Speaker 1: assured that eight hundred thousand head of cattle, some say
Speaker 1: nine hundred thousand perished in Comma's tribe alone. Never within
Speaker 1: the memory of man had such a thing been seen.
Speaker 1: The government grasped the situation from the beginning. But in
Speaker 1: spite of all the sanitary corps, Bordans and the severest
Speaker 1: preventative measures, the scourge pursued its course relentlessly.
Speaker 2: Whoa, yeah, eight hundred to nine hundred thousand.
Speaker 1: Oh that's like in one one area, like in one
Speaker 1: person's herd.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh my.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It was very challenging to pick just one first
Speaker 1: hand account. There are so many, oh my gosh. And
Speaker 1: I managed to sprinkle a few more in there. So
Speaker 1: that was from someone named Francois Colliard in eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: seven about the arrival of renderpest in South Africa.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh.
Speaker 2: And I'm Erin alman Updyke.
Speaker 1: And this is this podcast will kill you.
Speaker 2: And today we're talking about one of the most serious
Speaker 2: and intense diseases that you may have never heard of.
Speaker 1: It's amazing how much more devastating it is than I
Speaker 1: thought it was going to be. Like I knew it
Speaker 1: was a big deal, yeah, but holy cow, the sheer
Speaker 1: devastation and loss of life and the impact through history
Speaker 1: is like, yeah.
Speaker 2: I really I always try so hard to not get
Speaker 2: any of the history in my readings, but it was
Speaker 2: kind of hard to not see little glimpses and oh
Speaker 2: my god, oh yea, I can't oh oh yeah, so
Speaker 2: what disease is it?
Speaker 1: Erin we're talking about today, We're talking about render pest,
Speaker 1: which is the German for cattle plague. So it's a
Speaker 1: disease of cattle. Surprise the rise, but.
Speaker 2: Really it's it's as intense as anything you would ever want. Like,
Speaker 2: if you're like I don't care about cows, you're gonna
Speaker 2: care about these cows.
Speaker 1: So Erin, what are we drinking for a render pest?
Speaker 2: We are drinking utter delight, goodness.
Speaker 1: Excellent, another milky one erin.
Speaker 2: It's like milky, but not milky milky, you know.
Speaker 1: Sure, so it's milk emy okay exactly.
Speaker 2: This is basically a pinacolada, but we've used coconut ice
Speaker 2: cream instead of coconut cream of coconut. Yeah, so you
Speaker 2: could make it how you want it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, if you are lactose in tolerant, like
Speaker 1: our friend Katie, you can use something else besides coconut ice.
Speaker 2: Cream, like those coconut cream ice creams that they have.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, those are good, They're very good.
Speaker 2: And we'll post the full recipe for this quarantini as
Speaker 2: well as our non alcoholic plus e Brita on our website,
Speaker 2: this podcast will kill you, dot com YEP, and our
Speaker 2: social media of course, of.
Speaker 1: Course, Aaron, do we have any business to take care of?
Speaker 2: I really don't think so. Fifty two episodes fifty keep counting.
Speaker 1: We're starting to keep track again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for like another episode until I forget.
Speaker 1: Awesome? Aaron. Can we just dive in because I really
Speaker 1: want to know how this virus works.
Speaker 2: Oh, I'm really excited to tell you about it. Okay,
Speaker 2: let's take a quick break first. So this might be
Speaker 2: a new disease that we're talking about, I mean not new.
Speaker 2: It's really old. You'll tell us that. But it's also
Speaker 2: not going to be too new for some longtime listeners. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 2: I think I know why you do know why you
Speaker 2: are so so. Render pest is the disease caused by
Speaker 2: render pest virus RPV, which is in the genus morbili virus,
Speaker 2: which happens to be the same family of viruses as
Speaker 2: one of our favorite human pathogens, measles. Don't know, so
Speaker 2: I'm gonna likely throughout the biology and especially in the
Speaker 2: current section, do some compare contrast with what we already
Speaker 2: know about measles? When we talk about this disease and
Speaker 2: its effects. Okay, Yeah, and it turns out there's actually
Speaker 2: a lot of viruses in this family that are worthy
Speaker 2: of our concern. Measles we've talked about, but there are
Speaker 2: also a couple of other important Morbili viruses. PPR or
Speaker 2: pest de pity ruminant virus is that means the plague
Speaker 2: of small ruminants that affects sheeps and goats. There's also
Speaker 2: canine distemper virus, which if you have a dog, your
Speaker 2: dog has had to be vaccinated against canine distemps. And
Speaker 2: then there are also a lot of marine Morbila viruses
Speaker 2: that cause illness in dolphins and whales and seals, which
Speaker 2: is super sad.
Speaker 1: It's also really fascinating. Is it direct contact transmission?
Speaker 2: That's a really good question. I don't actually know. One
Speaker 2: of the papers or one of the books that I
Speaker 2: read had a section on them, but I had too
Speaker 2: much reading to do, so I skipped over it. So
Speaker 2: I don't actually know how they're transmitted, but I had
Speaker 2: that same thought.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting to think about, like aquatic cor marine
Speaker 1: transmission of infectious disease.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, so speaking of transmission, much like measles. Rinderpest
Speaker 2: virus is a highly infectious virus. It's spread I saw
Speaker 2: reports that it spread via the respiratory route, which is
Speaker 2: how measles virus of course is spread. But really what
Speaker 2: it boils down to is that this is a virus
Speaker 2: that's spread by close contact with sick animals. So once
Speaker 2: a sick animal enters like a herd, close contact with
Speaker 2: that animal is how that virus will spread. So it's
Speaker 2: not just through airborne transmission.
Speaker 1: And can it also be transmitted by let's say, a
Speaker 1: person traveling from herd to herd or farm to farm.
Speaker 2: Potentially, Yeah, Because this virus is contained in a lot
Speaker 2: of the bodily fluids from animals, then if that person
Speaker 2: had that fluid, then potentially it doesn't live for very
Speaker 2: long outside of the body though, so it would have
Speaker 2: to be pretty like immediate contact I think, like maybe
Speaker 2: a veterinarian or someone moving from a sick animal directly
Speaker 2: to another herd or something like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah all right. So importantly, while we talked about cows,
Speaker 2: and this is often called cattle plague, this is a
Speaker 2: virus that infects a huge range of animal species, not
Speaker 2: just cows. Essentially, it can affect pretty much the entire
Speaker 2: order of Ardiodactyla, which is the even toed ungulates. I
Speaker 2: had to google a lot about ungulates Aaron just to
Speaker 2: do this episode.
Speaker 1: I love ungulates.
Speaker 2: I had no idea that there was even toad ungulates
Speaker 2: and odd toed ungulates. Didn't know that was a thing.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you knew that already.
Speaker 1: Well, just kept from camera trapping and having to do all.
Speaker 2: The that makes sense. Yeah. So, for those of you
Speaker 2: who don't aren't familiar with the even toed ungulates, this
Speaker 2: includes water buffalo, wildebeest, yak zebu, hippos, gazelle's impalas, the
Speaker 2: greater kudoo, or rix or reebe wart, hogs, pigs, goats, sheep,
Speaker 2: pretty much all of the ungulates except the odd toad ones,
Speaker 2: which are horses, zebras, rhinoceroses, and tape heirs. Okay, cool,
Speaker 2: all right, But one thing that's really important is that
Speaker 2: although render pest virus can infect all these different species,
Speaker 2: there are a lot of different strains of renderpest virus
Speaker 2: that differ greatly in their virulence, so how sick they
Speaker 2: make the animal as well as their ability to actually
Speaker 2: infect these different species. So it's very possible to have
Speaker 2: an outbreak in, for example, a herd of water buffalo
Speaker 2: that seems like it doesn't infect the giraffes that are
Speaker 2: sharing the watering hole, even though giraffes in general are
Speaker 2: highly susceptible to render pest virus.
Speaker 1: Okay, that explains a lot about some of the reports
Speaker 1: and like first hand accounts of that, yeah, that I'll
Speaker 1: i'll talk about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So there's definitely times where there's outbreaks that
Speaker 2: seem like they're only in a certain group of animal,
Speaker 2: and it's likely just because of the strain of that
Speaker 2: particular virus. Gotcha, all right, So, since this is a virus,
Speaker 2: we know that it has to infect host cells in
Speaker 2: order to multiply, and in the case of renderpest virus,
Speaker 2: there are two different types of cells that this virus infects,
Speaker 2: and you'll see that the cell types that this virus
Speaker 2: infects result in these symptoms of disease that we see. So, first,
Speaker 2: it infects the epithelial cells, which we've talked about a
Speaker 2: lot on this podcast. Epithelial cells are those that line
Speaker 2: the tubes of your body and ungulate bodies also so
Speaker 2: like your mouth, your respiratory tract, your digestive tract, and
Speaker 2: then also the lymphoid tissue, so that's like tonsils, lymph nodes, spleen.
Speaker 2: The intestine also has lymph tissue that are called Pyre's patches.
Speaker 2: Those are really important in this infection. And lymphoid tissue
Speaker 2: is where basically mammalian bodies fight off infection. That's where
Speaker 2: our white blood cells congregate, and so that's how animals
Speaker 2: fight off infection.
Speaker 1: Gotcha, Yeah, all.
Speaker 2: Right, So in this case, the damage that we see
Speaker 2: and the symptoms that we see from this infection are
Speaker 2: from direct viral damage to these cells. A lot of
Speaker 2: times when we talk about virus infections, we are like,
Speaker 2: are the symptoms because of the virus or are they
Speaker 2: because of your body's reaction to the virus, And so
Speaker 2: in this case, it really is a ton of damage
Speaker 2: from the virus that are causing these symptoms. Okay, gotcha, yep,
Speaker 2: all right, let's talk about the symptoms.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's bad, it's gnarly, it's really gnarly. Okay.
Speaker 2: There are four or five stages of disease depending on
Speaker 2: which textbook you read, but they're really similar, so they
Speaker 2: are incubation prodrome, mucosal phase which is sometimes combined with
Speaker 2: the diarrheal phase, and then the convalescent phase parentheses.
Speaker 1: Or death which the or death is.
Speaker 2: Not getting.
Speaker 1: If you get to the convalescent phase, you are an
Speaker 1: extremely lucky ungulate.
Speaker 2: Or you had a very you know, a non virulent strain, fair, yes, yeah, yes, okay,
Speaker 2: So let's go through these phases. The incubation period we
Speaker 2: know is the time from when you first get infected
Speaker 2: until you start to show symptoms. So in the case
Speaker 2: of renderpest virus, most reports say this is between three
Speaker 2: to nine days, but it really depends on the strain,
Speaker 2: so it can be as great as eleven or even
Speaker 2: fifteen days if it's a less virulent strain, but in
Speaker 2: general three to nine days.
Speaker 1: Do these strains have any pattern in geographical distribution? Render
Speaker 1: press virus comes from Asia, so are strains less virulent
Speaker 1: there is?
Speaker 2: That?
Speaker 1: Is that one of the drivers?
Speaker 2: Good question. I'm not sure if strains are less virulent
Speaker 2: in Asia as compared to like Africa, for example, but
Speaker 2: they definitely do vary geographically, and really it's about like
Speaker 2: the species which they infect, so a strain might be
Speaker 2: really virulent in wildebeast, but then le virulent in a giraffe.
Speaker 2: If they even can get infected at all? Why, Oh,
Speaker 2: great question. It's such a good question. And I don't
Speaker 2: also know, like how many different strains are there? Are
Speaker 2: there dozens? Are there hundreds? I don't know, but there's
Speaker 2: a lot. There's more than like a couple.
Speaker 1: Interesting. Yeah, I knew that there were a bunch of strains,
Speaker 1: but now I have so many questions.
Speaker 2: Well, we'll see if I answer any of them, all right,
Speaker 2: then you'll begin the prodromal phase. The prodrome we've talked
Speaker 2: about a lot on this podcast, but it's basically non
Speaker 2: specific symptoms before you get to the real symptoms of disease.
Speaker 2: And so this prodromal phase usually lasts about three days,
Speaker 2: and the symptoms start with wait for it, a fever.
Speaker 2: I love it, and generally, I mean I don't love it.
Speaker 2: Generally it's a very sudden onset of fever which can
Speaker 2: get as high as forty one point five C, which
Speaker 2: is one hundred and six point seven fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: What is the normal body temperature for Oh, I'm.
Speaker 2: So glad that you ask, because I looked it up.
Speaker 2: I found one paper. This was looking at Gemsbock and
Speaker 2: will Deebeast. So for them, the average body temperature varied
Speaker 2: depending on environmental conditions between thirty seven point five and
Speaker 2: thirty nine C. So that's ninety nine point five fahrenheit
Speaker 2: and one oh two point two fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: Okay, so it's really not that I mean, it's a
Speaker 1: high fever, but it's not like in humans. It's not
Speaker 1: as concerning as that temperature would be in humans, right, so,
Speaker 1: I mean, but still it's render pest.
Speaker 2: So it's been really high I think no matter what.
Speaker 2: Like in humans, that fever could kill you easily. But
Speaker 2: even for an ungulate, even at their high end temperature
Speaker 2: range of one hundred and two one hundred and six
Speaker 2: is four full fahrenheit degrees higher than that, that's pretty
Speaker 2: that's high.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it's it's definitely a high fever.
Speaker 2: So anyways, so then this pro drummal phase also has
Speaker 2: some other non specific symptoms restlessness, anorexia, so the animal
Speaker 2: might stop eating always. I've seen the descriptions. Their muzzle
Speaker 2: gets dry, so the hairs around their muzzle get really dry.
Speaker 2: If they are lactating, their milk yield will drop, their
Speaker 2: breathing will become fast, it will becomes shallow and more rapid,
Speaker 2: and then their mucous membranes start to get congested with secretions,
Speaker 2: so their mouth, their nose, their eyes start having purulent
Speaker 2: secretions coming out of them. Sounds pretty terrible, pretty terrible.
Speaker 1: And that's just the pro drum stage.
Speaker 2: Just stage two, Just stage two. Then you enter the
Speaker 2: mucosal phase. This starts about two to five days after
Speaker 2: the first onset of fever, and it starts with tiny
Speaker 2: little pin head spots of necrosis, so tissue death in
Speaker 2: those epithelial cells in the mucous membrane, which looks like
Speaker 2: little pinpoint gray or white spots in the mouth of
Speaker 2: the animal. Does that sound familiar to you, because it should.
Speaker 1: It sounds like measles.
Speaker 2: It sounds like coplic spots, which are pathandomonic for measles
Speaker 2: in humans.
Speaker 1: It's exactly what I was gonna say. I totally had
Speaker 1: those those words right there. I haven't forgotten that at all.
Speaker 2: You did, remember, though, mesos.
Speaker 1: That's pretty cool, only because they're like very similar. I
Speaker 1: like diazels those spots.
Speaker 2: I know. Oh, but isn't that so interesting? Oh? I
Speaker 2: think that's so interesting.
Speaker 1: It's interesting, and all I can think of is like,
Speaker 1: you know, I picture owning cattle and then doing a
Speaker 1: check and see those spots and being like.
Speaker 2: Oh God, God terrified.
Speaker 1: Yeah, knowing what's ahead of you is horrible, not good.
Speaker 2: It just gets worse. Let's keep going. So in the
Speaker 2: affected animals, the spots appear in the mouth and then
Speaker 2: they tend to extend, so whereas in measles they just
Speaker 2: tend to be those pinpoint spots. Here they're going to
Speaker 2: start to enlarge. They're going to involve larger and larger
Speaker 2: areas of epithelium, the tongue, the pharynx, and these spots
Speaker 2: are not only contained in the mouth. These mucosal erosions
Speaker 2: are happening throughout the entire digestive system as well. Okay,
Speaker 2: So that leads into the next phase, which is sometimes
Speaker 2: combined with this, and that is the diarrheal phase.
Speaker 1: That makes sense, your body just basically can't digest anything exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So this diarrheal phase, if you separate it out,
Speaker 2: tends to start about four to five days after the
Speaker 2: onset of fever, three days after the first spots appear
Speaker 2: in the mouth, and it's basically uncontrolled, profuse diarrhea, liquid
Speaker 2: explosive green yellow gray at first, and then with a
Speaker 2: lot of mucus and blood. And that's because those erosions
Speaker 2: have extended to most of the digestive tract. Oh my gosh,
Speaker 2: I know, it's horrific. Yeah, And that's kind of the
Speaker 2: biggest Like animals often die from dehydration from just the massive,
Speaker 2: massive amount of diarrhea. You can also see a maculo
Speaker 2: popular rash, which is the same type of rash that
Speaker 2: we see in human measles on areas of soft skin
Speaker 2: of the animal that don't have a lot of hair
Speaker 2: covering them, so like the utters or in the groin
Speaker 2: or the axilla, the armpits and leg pits, and then
Speaker 2: you'll still have the discharges from the eyes and the nose.
Speaker 2: These animals are very, very sick, even though the fever
Speaker 2: tends to subside by this time. They're just I mean,
Speaker 2: they're wasting away, right. They're not eating because these erosions
Speaker 2: are likely also they're throughout the pharynx. They can be
Speaker 2: in the respiratory tract as well, so they're not eating
Speaker 2: a lot, they're salivating a lot, they're not moving. They
Speaker 2: often have coughing and grunting with exhalation suggesting that breathing
Speaker 2: is painful or difficult. They become severely dehydrated, and they
Speaker 2: often adopt this characteristic stance that's called milk fever posture,
Speaker 2: which I looked up what it looks like. This is
Speaker 2: not milk fever, that's something entirely different, but it's basically
Speaker 2: where they put their sternam onto the ground and then
Speaker 2: they kind of flop onto their side and their head
Speaker 2: turns to one side and their legs are kind of
Speaker 2: slumped underneath them, and most often they'll die within five
Speaker 2: to fourteen days after the first onset of illness. This
Speaker 2: is so sad, it's really really sad.
Speaker 1: When are they first infectious?
Speaker 2: Great question. They're most infectious after the onset of symptoms.
Speaker 2: So there have been like in a lot of experimental studies,
Speaker 2: you can like swab an animal and then infect another
Speaker 2: animal before those symptoms first start, but really it's once
Speaker 2: the symptoms start, once those spots appear and they're symptomatic,
Speaker 2: that's ok their most infectious.
Speaker 1: Okay, So in the mucosal phase, the.
Speaker 2: Mucosal and diarrheal phase, Yeah, and that diarrhea full of virus.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, yeah, well, I was just imagining
Speaker 1: being a vet before you knew what renderpest was and
Speaker 1: how it was transmitted, and walking and your boots in
Speaker 1: one farm and going to the next farm, lokin on
Speaker 1: your boots like it's so easy.
Speaker 2: The good thing is it doesn't live for very long
Speaker 2: in the environment.
Speaker 1: Do you know how long?
Speaker 2: Most of the things I saw were like forty eight
Speaker 2: hours max.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, that's long enough.
Speaker 2: I mean it is, But you know, it's also like
Speaker 2: I think that you need. They mostly were suggesting that
Speaker 2: you would need really high concentrations of the virus in
Speaker 2: the environment for an animal to get infected just from
Speaker 2: environmental exposure. M hmm, okay, so yeah, if the animal
Speaker 2: doesn't die, so if they had kind of a less
Speaker 2: virulent strain, for example, or if they somehow happen to
Speaker 2: survive this infection. The convalescent phase is the last phase.
Speaker 2: It's quite prolonged. While the lesions, those mucosal lesions tend
Speaker 2: to heal within a week or so, there's often secondary
Speaker 2: bacterial infections on top of those, and the diarrhea takes
Speaker 2: a really long time to resolve, like four to five weeks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can imagine it would have to come with
Speaker 1: long term health.
Speaker 2: Eff absolutely absolutely. Speaking of long term effects, you remember
Speaker 2: in our measles episode, we talked about how much measles
Speaker 2: rex our immune system.
Speaker 1: Uh huh, immune amnesia m hm.
Speaker 2: Measles causes immunosuppression immediately after the infection that can persist
Speaker 2: for a long time, as well as causing like that
Speaker 2: immune amnesia that you mentioned where we can no longer
Speaker 2: fight off infections we had previously been exposed to. Render
Speaker 2: pest also absolutely reaks havoc on the immune system of
Speaker 2: these animals. So it's very common that even if an
Speaker 2: animal survives render pest infection, latent infections can become activated
Speaker 2: after so things that they maybe had some bacteria kind
Speaker 2: of growing somewhere, or a parasite or something that kind
Speaker 2: of their body was just low level taking care of
Speaker 2: now can become reactivated, and they can become more ill
Speaker 2: from a second infection afterwards. And it's because remember that
Speaker 2: this virus in affects your lymph tissue, right, so it's
Speaker 2: actively causing depletion of your immune cells. That's one of
Speaker 2: the hallmark kind of lab signs that you would see
Speaker 2: if you were to draw a cow's blood while it's infected,
Speaker 2: they'd have almost no white blood cells.
Speaker 1: Yeah, makes sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's really really depressing. Overall mortality rates are
Speaker 2: often over ninety percent, approaching one hundred percent.
Speaker 1: It's unreal. Yeah, I mean, it's very real, but it's
Speaker 1: hard to believe.
Speaker 2: I know, it's absolutely horrific. That's I mean, that's the
Speaker 2: disease in a nutshell.
Speaker 1: It's a really bad one.
Speaker 2: It is a really bad one. So should I say
Speaker 2: the good news right now, just so that people don't
Speaker 2: get too depressed before we start on the history?
Speaker 1: Sure?
Speaker 2: Uh, we eradicated it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the second disease to be eradicated ever in
Speaker 1: the history of diseases. It's so cool.
Speaker 2: It's very cool, very cool. So this disease no longer
Speaker 2: exists in the wild, in domestic animals, it doesn't exist
Speaker 2: except in laboratory vials.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a lot of labs, not all, but some
Speaker 1: have destroyed their.
Speaker 2: Which is thrilling. So yeah, So Aaron, what the heck?
Speaker 1: I can't wait to tell you.
Speaker 2: I can't. I want to know everything. Where did it
Speaker 2: come from? How bad has it been? Like? Oh? I
Speaker 2: want to know it all.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's take a quick break first. Even though render
Speaker 1: pest is highly related to measles, as you mentioned, I
Speaker 1: think that one appropriate comparison is that render pest is
Speaker 1: basically the smallpox of the cattle world, even though there's
Speaker 1: also cowpox.
Speaker 2: But this is much worse than cowpox, right.
Speaker 1: It's much worse than cowpox. And so the reason I
Speaker 1: say that is because if you think about our smallpox
Speaker 1: episode you or just think about smallpox, you may remember
Speaker 1: it is a horribly devastating, super contagious, fatal disease and
Speaker 1: there have been massive epidemics that have killed huge numbers
Speaker 1: of people and paved the way for colonialism. And then,
Speaker 1: just as with smallpox, there's this happy ending with the
Speaker 1: eradication of the disease. So all you have to do
Speaker 1: in thinking about smallpox is replaced people with cattle and
Speaker 1: there you go.
Speaker 2: So story over, Just listen to our smallpox episode.
Speaker 1: There you go, there you go, and my work here
Speaker 1: is done. No. But yeah, so, as you talked about, Aaron,
Speaker 1: render pest is a horrible disease and has had a
Speaker 1: huge economic impact in affected areas, and it's obviously been eradicated.
Speaker 1: But I think to understand why there was such an
Speaker 1: effort made to eradicate this disease, because eradication requires a
Speaker 1: lot of resources, a lot of time, a lot of money,
Speaker 1: and it's also like not possible for all pathogens, and
Speaker 1: so why is this one? Why did we choose to
Speaker 1: eradicate render pest? And to understand that, I think it
Speaker 1: calls for talking about its massive history. Yes, because it
Speaker 1: is so massive and so interesting and I had no idea,
Speaker 1: so I'm very excited. Okay, where did render pest come from? Well,
Speaker 1: it's very, very very old, like measles, So as we
Speaker 1: talked about in the measles episode, there's going to be
Speaker 1: a lot of that. Measles requires a certain size of
Speaker 1: a population, a population density, in order to be sustained.
Speaker 1: Otherwise it just burns itself out and then it's gone.
Speaker 1: And that's the same thing for rinderpest virus. And cattle
Speaker 1: and other ungulates are herd animals and they probably reached
Speaker 1: that critical mass before humans did. So it's thought that
Speaker 1: render pest may have evolved with bovines since the Pleistocene,
Speaker 1: so like two million to twelve thousand years ago, somewhere
Speaker 1: in there. But domestication probably facilitated its transmission and allowed
Speaker 1: for it to be sustained within these populations, and then
Speaker 1: once humans grew enlarge enough populations, render pest jump species
Speaker 1: and evolved into the measles virus, maybe five to seven
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, maybe as recently as the eleventh century.
Speaker 1: If you want to hear more, listen to our measles episode.
Speaker 1: Render past probably had its geographical origins in Asia and
Speaker 1: was probably restricted to that part of the world until
Speaker 1: around three hundred and seventy ish current era, at least
Speaker 1: as far as we can say for sure. As far
Speaker 1: as like there is universal agreement, mostly universal agreement. Is
Speaker 1: there universal agreement in anything in science? No gravity?
Speaker 2: Maybe so.
Speaker 1: There are some mentions in papyri from ancient Egypt that
Speaker 1: might be render passed, dating back to three thousand BCE
Speaker 1: describing an ill bull with labored breathing, running eyes, inflamed gums,
Speaker 1: and a swollen neck, and the treatment was either to
Speaker 1: submerge the bowl and water or cover it with cucumber slices.
Speaker 2: If that didn't work, wait what Yeah.
Speaker 1: To cool it down because it was thought to be
Speaker 1: like they think that was indicating that it was like
Speaker 1: a fever. That's why you're to cool.
Speaker 2: It down like cool as a cucumber.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness, that would take a lot of cucumbers.
Speaker 1: I know, I don't know how many you would need.
Speaker 1: How many cucumbers would you need to cover an average
Speaker 1: size bull?
Speaker 2: Should we ask siri?
Speaker 1: We'll ask the internet, the listeners. Someone did the math
Speaker 1: for us, Just kidding. And also, rinderpest may have been
Speaker 1: the fifth plague of Egypt mentioned in Exodus. What so
Speaker 1: from Exodus is a line from Exodus. This is what
Speaker 1: the Lord, the God of the Hebrews says. Let my
Speaker 1: people go so that they may worship me. If you
Speaker 1: refuse to let them go and continue to hold them back,
Speaker 1: the hand of the Lord will bring a terrible plague
Speaker 1: on your livestock in the field, on your horses and
Speaker 1: donkeys and camels, and on your cattle and sheep and goats.
Speaker 1: Horses are in there too, So maybe not could have
Speaker 1: been anthrax. We don't know. And some researchers point to
Speaker 1: a description of a cattle disease in Ireland from around
Speaker 1: twenty forty eight BCE, but it's debated whether that's actually
Speaker 1: render pest. Okay, because the challenging thing about tracing back
Speaker 1: these early mentions of render pest is trying to distinguish
Speaker 1: it from all of the other horrible diseases that affected
Speaker 1: cattle and livestock, so namely foot and mouth disease, and also,
Speaker 1: as I said, anthrax. But usually you can tell between
Speaker 1: an anthrax epidemic and a renderpest epidemic in like historical texts.
Speaker 1: If the descriptions are of just cattle being affected, then
Speaker 1: it's probably render pest. But if it's cattle and humans
Speaker 1: and dogs and other animals, then it's probably anthrax.
Speaker 2: That makes sense, okay.
Speaker 1: So that brings us to the first recognized description. Around
Speaker 1: three hundred and seventy current era, the Huns began their
Speaker 1: invasion of your starting in the southeast. They brought with
Speaker 1: them gray steppe oxen, which happened to be remarkably resistant
Speaker 1: to render pest, so about a twenty five percent mortality
Speaker 1: rate instead of the ninety five to two one hundred
Speaker 1: percent experienced by other cattle. But even though these oxen
Speaker 1: were resistant, they could still spread the disease, and spread
Speaker 1: it they did, and so after the invasion by the Huns,
Speaker 1: a combination of drought and render pest led to the
Speaker 1: deaths of nearly all the cattle in Europe around this time,
Speaker 1: especially Southeast Europe YEP. And this plague raged for nearly
Speaker 1: ten years from three seventy six to three eighty six
Speaker 1: current era, impacting Rome, Belgium, Hungary, Austria, France, et cetera. Wow,
Speaker 1: it was big, yeah, And from this first epidemic, the
Speaker 1: disease basically became established. It became endemic in Europe, with
Speaker 1: epidemics occurring every few years, just like we see with measles.
Speaker 1: Once you get enough susceptibles back into the population, then
Speaker 1: you get another outbreak, and then there aren't enough to
Speaker 1: sustain it, and so on and so forth. So and
Speaker 1: the length of these epidemics varied based on how many
Speaker 1: susceptible cattle there were, the movement of the cattle, whether
Speaker 1: there were any control measures or enacted, how politically stable
Speaker 1: a region was. You know, it varied. But so even
Speaker 1: though the length varied, what they did was perpetuate it
Speaker 1: enough so that renderpest kind of slowly spread throughout the
Speaker 1: rest of Europe, finally reaching England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales
Speaker 1: around six ninety four. To seven oh seven current era
Speaker 1: wo and that was another horrific outbreak which led to
Speaker 1: famine in which people reportedly had to resort to cannibalism
Speaker 1: in order to survive. And there it was called Step
Speaker 1: Moraine because it was thought to have come from the
Speaker 1: Step country around the Caspian Basin, so like between southern
Speaker 1: Europe and Asia. Just a little side note, but if
Speaker 1: you remember from our lactose intolerance episode, different parts of
Speaker 1: Europe relied on pastoralism to different degrees and so the
Speaker 1: impact of render pest may have varied based on that.
Speaker 1: And so in a place like England which had a
Speaker 1: higher reliance on cattle, like, it was really devastating, right,
Speaker 1: that makes sense, And that very first render pest epidemic
Speaker 1: following the invasion of the Huns started a long long
Speaker 1: period of render pest rule in Europe and Asia and
Speaker 1: a few patterns emerged. So, like I said, there was
Speaker 1: a cyclical pattern where epidemics would occur every few years
Speaker 1: and they were often associated with drought. Drought seemed to
Speaker 1: actually be a trigger for render pest because the stress
Speaker 1: and malnutrition weakened the immune system. And also if you
Speaker 1: have a drought, then your water sources tend to be
Speaker 1: more concentrated. Syna get congregation.
Speaker 2: They congregate. Oh gosh, double triple whammy. Man, Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: oh yeah.
Speaker 1: And another pattern was that rinderpest became known as the
Speaker 1: disease of war. If you were heading a warring army
Speaker 1: or whatever, you had to bring a ton of equipment
Speaker 1: with you, like weapons and food and tents and clothing,
Speaker 1: and so oxen were in super high demand. You had
Speaker 1: to have huge teams of oxen. And you're bringing then
Speaker 1: these oxen from one place to another, allowing for you know,
Speaker 1: pathogen mixing. Basically that's not good. And also armies would
Speaker 1: travel with cattle as a food source, as a portable
Speaker 1: food source, and not just food, but also for materials
Speaker 1: like leather and you know, cattle or you can do
Speaker 1: a lot with one cow, Yes, you sure can. It's amazing.
Speaker 1: And so there's no doubt that rinderpest changed the course
Speaker 1: of history by impacting warring armies and who made it
Speaker 1: where and when and who could actually leave wo So,
Speaker 1: for example, Charlemagne's campaigns in Central Europe around eight hundred
Speaker 1: CE were slowed down by rinderpest. Quote so great was
Speaker 1: the pestilence of oxen in this expedition that scarcely in
Speaker 1: the whole army did one remain, but all perished. And
Speaker 1: not only there, but a plague among animals causing a
Speaker 1: dreadful mortality broke out in all the provinces conquered by
Speaker 1: the emperor. Wow, so it's like it happened. It happened
Speaker 1: a lot, and it was devastating, and just the rise
Speaker 1: of trade and increase in human movements also led to
Speaker 1: a horizon in wrinderpest makes sense, And because I mentioned
Speaker 1: ancient Rome, I also have to then attribute the fall
Speaker 1: of the Roman Empire to rinderpest in this episode.
Speaker 2: Of course. Well, you know, we haven't gotten to do
Speaker 2: that in a while on this.
Speaker 1: We really haven't. But it is time it is thought,
Speaker 1: I mean it. You know, this might be less of
Speaker 1: the stretch than the other ones. Not render Pest, but
Speaker 1: at least the invasion of the Huns into Rome, along
Speaker 1: with the goth is thought to be one of the
Speaker 1: major contributors to the fall of the Roman Empire, according
Speaker 1: to some source that I read, and so basically, render
Speaker 1: pest became this enormously dreaded disease because its arrival in
Speaker 1: a region meant that the next few months to years
Speaker 1: would be extremely difficult. There was economic devastation, loss of
Speaker 1: an important food source, loss of crucial materials. If something, anything,
Speaker 1: had the slightest chance of reducing the disease or preventing
Speaker 1: it spread, people tried it out. So people had long
Speaker 1: recognized the contagiousness of the disease, so they would slaughter
Speaker 1: cows that appeared infected, et cetera. But no cure could
Speaker 1: be found that was effective, but that didn't stop people
Speaker 1: from trying its outrageous ancient cures time eras.
Speaker 2: Another thing we haven't done in far too long. This
Speaker 2: is full of everything we love.
Speaker 1: It is. Okay, So we already know about the practice
Speaker 1: of covering the cow and cucumbers. That didn't work well.
Speaker 1: In ancient Egypt, you were also advised to cut the
Speaker 1: cow's tail and nose and cover its eyes with burnt linen.
Speaker 1: What I'm just reading what I read, just.
Speaker 2: Cut like cut their tail off or just like put
Speaker 2: a little cut in it.
Speaker 1: You cut it to bleed it.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's weird, all right?
Speaker 1: Uh huh? I mean, of course, and an ancient rome
Speaker 1: a preventative was to quote, give to the cattle a
Speaker 1: mixture of salt, laura leaves, onions, cloves of garlic, incense,
Speaker 1: powdered rue, and burning charcoal made up with a little wine,
Speaker 1: just a little cocktail, little cattle quarantiny. And if that
Speaker 1: didn't work and a cow became infected, then you quote
Speaker 1: make it swallow an egg whole, and then the next
Speaker 1: day give a clove of garlic beaten up in wine.
Speaker 1: I don't know how you make a cow swallow an
Speaker 1: egg hole.
Speaker 2: A chicken egg or like what I mean be more
Speaker 2: specific here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess there's a lot of loopholes. They shake
Speaker 1: cures a quail egg. It could be a quail fish egg.
Speaker 1: I don't know, ostrich egg. And then of course purgatives
Speaker 1: and bleeding were super popular cures. A whole market around
Speaker 1: snake oil cures for winterpest sprung up. So one of
Speaker 1: these from eighteenth century Germany was like a bacon and
Speaker 1: flax enema for the cow. Little bits of bacon you
Speaker 1: put up the cows. But after it's had its whole,
Speaker 1: like diarrheal with fust.
Speaker 2: Also flax and bacon, that is.
Speaker 1: And then and then if it became constipated. You put
Speaker 1: an apple up there, a small apple.
Speaker 2: A small apple, not a large apple.
Speaker 1: No, no, just a small apple.
Speaker 2: Do you cut it up first?
Speaker 1: No? No, no, of course not. You would diminish its
Speaker 1: curative powers that way.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't want to break the skin. Oh goodness, okay
Speaker 2: for constipation, that'll do it?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2: Cool.
Speaker 1: No. And if these preventatives or cures didn't work, and
Speaker 1: they never did, ever, they never did, there was always
Speaker 1: prayer and ritual and so sometimes cattle were branded with
Speaker 1: a cross between the eyes. Sometimes the head of the
Speaker 1: first cow to die was cut off and then displayed,
Speaker 1: or a cowskull was buried under the house for those
Speaker 1: were all widespread practices, okay, And other times there were
Speaker 1: slightly more elaborate rituals to protect a village from render pest.
Speaker 1: Until the late eighteen hundreds, people didn't know what caused
Speaker 1: render pest, and theories ranged from the typical miasma to
Speaker 1: punishment by God to maybe witchcraft. And outbreaks of renderpest
Speaker 1: were often accompanied by accusations of witchcraft, and many villages
Speaker 1: employed annual rituals to protect them from the disease. So
Speaker 1: I want to read to you a couple of these
Speaker 1: rituals from Russia, because I think it's so fascinating, like
Speaker 1: their intricate and specific. Okay, so first, confine all the
Speaker 1: men and cattle and make sure they don't escape together.
Speaker 1: Or it didn't mention that, so maybe not as specific
Speaker 1: as I was hailing it to be. Okay, all right,
Speaker 1: they're confined, and then the women should wear their shifts
Speaker 1: and let their hair down. Then the oldest woman should
Speaker 1: be yoked to a plow, which is then drawn around
Speaker 1: the village three times, while the rest of the women
Speaker 1: follow behind her carrying shovels and tongs and sing.
Speaker 2: You make the oldest woman yoke around the town three times? Uh?
Speaker 1: Huh? Alone, Well you're she's followed by the rest of
Speaker 1: the women in.
Speaker 2: The or are they helping hold the thing?
Speaker 1: I think they are? I think they are.
Speaker 2: I would hope, I would hope.
Speaker 1: Alternatively, still with the men and cattle locked up, old
Speaker 1: women with fur like the tree fur tree torches circled
Speaker 1: a widow who was naked with a horse collar around
Speaker 1: her neck, right, and then they had to go to
Speaker 1: each farmyard and cry out, I cut Hugh the cow death.
Speaker 1: There she goes and if a cat or a dog
Speaker 1: ran out, that was taken to be the cattle plague,
Speaker 1: like the spirit of the cattle plague, and it was killed.
Speaker 2: So is this not witchcraft? That's what I was thinking too.
Speaker 1: I'm like a lot of these rituals that like protect
Speaker 1: the village from witchcraft sound a lot like witchcraft, like
Speaker 1: like what people would think of as witchcraft. I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't know either, but like a naked lady in
Speaker 2: a field being surrounded by burning fire torches sounds a
Speaker 2: lot like what I think of as like that is
Speaker 2: what practical magic has led me to believe Witchcrest is.
Speaker 1: So it really is. That's my touch point. And then
Speaker 1: this was the song that was often sung to get
Speaker 1: the plague to leave. Death, Oh thou cow death, depart
Speaker 1: from our village, from the stable, from the court, through
Speaker 1: our village goes Holy Flassy, which is the saint who
Speaker 1: was like the protector of rinderpest. With incense, with taper,
Speaker 1: with burning embers, come not to our village, meddle, not
Speaker 1: with our cows nut brown chestnut, star browed, white, teeated, white, uttered, crumpled, horned,
Speaker 1: one horned. You sing that, but.
Speaker 2: That's using that in Russian for us.
Speaker 1: I cannot. And throughout Europe, you know, this wasn't restricted
Speaker 1: to Russia. Throughout Europe, fire festivals were often held to
Speaker 1: try to protect villages, and a lot of these included
Speaker 1: just marching the cattle in a certain direction around a fire.
Speaker 2: Fire festivals, fire.
Speaker 1: Festivals, I know, I had to put that in there.
Speaker 1: Fire festivals, and these cattle protection or purification rituals were
Speaker 1: not restricted to Russia and Europe, of course. So for example,
Speaker 1: in Western Africa, Fulani pastoralists would often build an arch
Speaker 1: of the mimosa tree and drive the cattle through them
Speaker 1: as a protective measure. But in some of these rituals, however,
Speaker 1: the opposite of the desired effect was achieved. So for instance,
Speaker 1: if you're gathering all the cattle in the village together
Speaker 1: to then march around the fire, there's going to be
Speaker 1: more interaction, there's going to be more potential transmission. And
Speaker 1: one of the other practices was that priests would travel
Speaker 1: from farm to farm to bless the cattle, and that
Speaker 1: often ended up being basically transmitting the disease from farm
Speaker 1: to farm. So this wide variety of cures, as well
Speaker 1: as how geographically distributed they were shows just how important
Speaker 1: this disease was considered to be. But let's put some
Speaker 1: numbers to that. So, Aaron, you talked about the extremely
Speaker 1: high mortality rate, so we already know in theory how
Speaker 1: devastating it could be, right, and often the death toll
Speaker 1: was made worse by those secondary bacterial infections or by
Speaker 1: the very common practice of slaughtering a herd to try
Speaker 1: to prevent its spread. So like the preemptive killing, even
Speaker 1: if a cow was suspected to be sick, it was
Speaker 1: often killed, culling the herd. Culling the herd. All right,
Speaker 1: So let's check out renderpest in Europe in the eighteenth century,
Speaker 1: during which time there was essentially a panzuotic like a
Speaker 1: pandemic but for animals. Between seventeen eleven and seventeen sixty
Speaker 1: nine and estimated one hundred million cattle in Europe died
Speaker 1: from winder pest whoa in like fifty years and by
Speaker 1: the end of that century, so from seventeen eleven to
Speaker 1: eighteen hundred, it was around two hundred million cattle that
Speaker 1: had died, which is like, imagine that economic toll, imagine
Speaker 1: the loss of food. Oh, my goodness. Uh huh. And
Speaker 1: in India and other parts of Asia, cattle deaths would
Speaker 1: run into the hundreds of thousands every single year basically
Speaker 1: up until the time when like vaccination became more widespread
Speaker 1: and available. I mean it was. It's really bad. So
Speaker 1: if your livelihood was livestock, you could go from wealthy
Speaker 1: or comfortable or surviving to abject poverty within ten days
Speaker 1: as renderpest swept through your herd. Oh god. And you
Speaker 1: would think that given this much time, the disease may
Speaker 1: have decreased in lethality a bit in those places where
Speaker 1: it had been endemic for a very long time, but
Speaker 1: it didn't really seemed to all that much, or at
Speaker 1: least as much as you would expect, which is very interesting.
Speaker 1: So for instance, that panzootic in Europe in the eighteenth
Speaker 1: century that had an overall mortality rate of around ninety percent.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And certainly in some parts it wasn't as deadly,
Speaker 1: or certain breeds of cattle or oxen were more resistant,
Speaker 1: but still like not great. Yeah, this was like the
Speaker 1: black death or smallpox of cows, and its extreme lethality,
Speaker 1: of course earned it the name that we call it today.
Speaker 1: Render pest, which is German for cattle plague. Like I said,
Speaker 1: by the late nineteenth century, render pest had been a
Speaker 1: fear disease for centuries, and that fear had led to
Speaker 1: strict policies about cattle movement and importation being implemented all
Speaker 1: over Europe and Asia to try to prevent these outbreaks.
Speaker 1: But obviously they didn't always work, and soon the world
Speaker 1: would see the devastation that render pest could cause when
Speaker 1: released into an immunal life logically naive population of susceptible hosts.
Speaker 1: Oh no, yeah. Up to this point, so, up to
Speaker 1: the late nineteenth century, render pest in Africa had been
Speaker 1: limited to the Nile River Valley, with occasional outbreaks occurring
Speaker 1: from trade with Europe in the Middle East, but its
Speaker 1: movement south of that area had been restricted fortunately, but
Speaker 1: that all changed when in eighteen eighty seven or eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty eight, infected cattle were brought to Ethiopia by an
Speaker 1: Italian military campaign who was invading to try to take control,
Speaker 1: and what followed would be one of the most devastating
Speaker 1: panzootics ever to be witnessed. From Ethiopia, render past spreads
Speaker 1: south rapidly, leaving corpses in its wake. And I have
Speaker 1: another quote here, and I have a few more quotes
Speaker 1: in this section because I couldn't resist give them to me.
Speaker 1: Never before, in the memory of man, or by the
Speaker 1: voice of tradition, have the cattle died such vast numbers.
Speaker 1: Never before has the wild game suffered. Nearly all the
Speaker 1: buffalo and eland are gone, the giraffe has suffered, and
Speaker 1: many of the small antelopes, the bushbuck and read book
Speaker 1: I believe especially it was from Lugard. In eighteen ninety three,
Speaker 1: East Africa fell victim to the cattle plague. Its enormous
Speaker 1: herds of wild ungulates and cattle herded by the Massai
Speaker 1: nearly all killed. South Africa watched helplessly as rinderpest continued
Speaker 1: its spread, and was given a brief reprieve when it
Speaker 1: was temporarily stopped by the Zambizi River. But it wouldn't
Speaker 1: hold for long, and in March eighteen ninety six, the
Speaker 1: cattle plagued crossed the Zambizi and basically sealed the fate
Speaker 1: of the entire continent. In some parts of the continent,
Speaker 1: renderpest arrived alongside a severe drought like really a really
Speaker 1: horrible one, followed by late rains which led to huge
Speaker 1: swarms of locusts that ate all the crops. And when
Speaker 1: the reins did finally come, they arrived in such intensity
Speaker 1: that the crops that had survived the drought and the
Speaker 1: locusts and the rats and the caterpillars were destroyed.
Speaker 2: Oh my.
Speaker 1: The loss of cattle and crops brought on an extreme famine,
Speaker 1: and in East Africa there was still one more horsemen
Speaker 1: of the apocalypse to arrive, this time in the form
Speaker 1: of a massive smallpox epidemic that swept across the region.
Speaker 2: Are you kidding, dude?
Speaker 1: No, I know it is. It is awful, just devastating.
Speaker 1: The loss of human life from famine, from smallpox, from
Speaker 1: other diseases that were happening was incredible, with an estimated
Speaker 1: death toll of up to one half to two thirds
Speaker 1: of the population in parts of East Africa, what yep.
Speaker 1: And the death toll of livestock and wildlife was something
Speaker 1: no one had witnessed before across the continent. An estimated
Speaker 1: eighty to ninety percent of cattle, buffalo elan giraffe, wildeb'st kudu,
Speaker 1: and antelopes died like of all of them, not just
Speaker 1: of the ones infected, but like of all of them.
Speaker 1: In South Africa alone, about two and a half million
Speaker 1: cattle died within a couple of years. Even though the
Speaker 1: Great African panzolotic which was eighteen eighty seven to eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety seven, even though it occurred after the development of
Speaker 1: germ theory, help arrived too late to do much. So
Speaker 1: a team largely composed of veterinarians had started in eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety six to try to develop an immune serum as
Speaker 1: a treatment, and Robert Koch arrived that same year to
Speaker 1: work on a vaccine. Oh and a side note that
Speaker 1: I forgot to mention earlier. Veterinary education and veterinary schools
Speaker 1: were started in large part due to rinderpest and trying
Speaker 1: to understand Yeah I know that, isn't that cool? Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So Rapercoke discovered that the bile from an infected ox
Speaker 1: was generally noneffective and could actually induce immunity to render pest,
Speaker 1: but it also wasn't perfect and ended up causing a
Speaker 1: certain degree of death or active infection, which was of
Speaker 1: course problematic, giving both immune serum and virulent blood did
Speaker 1: seem to work, however, to produce longer term immunity. But
Speaker 1: in any case, these methods of immunization arrived a bit
Speaker 1: too late to have any effect on the Great African panzawotic,
Speaker 1: but they were helpful in advancing veterinary knowledge and slowing
Speaker 1: down future outbreaks. So this massive outbreak kind of more
Speaker 1: or less just died out on its own after there
Speaker 1: were no more susceptible animals to perpetuate the disease. And
Speaker 1: the impact wasn't just that it killed millions upon millions
Speaker 1: of cattle and wild ungulates and led to widespread famine
Speaker 1: and poverty. It also had an incredible amount of cascading effects,
Speaker 1: both sociopolitically and ecologically and in many, many other parts
Speaker 1: of life. And I want to talk about those. I
Speaker 1: want to do a little bit of a magnifying glass
Speaker 1: on some of those, because I think this is where
Speaker 1: it gets very connection ze you get to see, like
Speaker 1: the widespread implications of a pandemic or a panzootic. So
Speaker 1: as in many other places, cattle played an extremely important
Speaker 1: role in the daily life from many people in Africa.
Speaker 1: They served as a food source but also as plow animals.
Speaker 1: For land cultivation, travel and transport of goods, materials for
Speaker 1: the goods themselves, so like cowhides used as clothing, sleeping mats, leather,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Dung was used as fertilizer or as a
Speaker 1: fuel for heating. And this last bit, dung is fuel
Speaker 1: for heating, became especially important at the end of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century when the European colonial rule was kind of
Speaker 1: booming and they had taken over forests and commercialized them,
Speaker 1: outlawing the collecting of wood for fires right gracious so yep.
Speaker 1: Cattle also played a huge role in trade and as
Speaker 1: a form of currency. They were often used in arranging
Speaker 1: marriages and also as a punishment. If you committed a crime,
Speaker 1: you may have had to pay in cattle, and so
Speaker 1: the death of ninety to one hundred percent of your
Speaker 1: cattle herd for many people meant instant poverty and no food.
Speaker 1: The renderpest Panzawata came at a time when European countries
Speaker 1: were scrambling for control over the continent, particularly the southern
Speaker 1: half of the continent, and many countries were already under
Speaker 1: European rule. But these colonial governments were always afraid of
Speaker 1: an uprising and did whatever they could to stomp out
Speaker 1: any signs of rebellion. In European reports at the time,
Speaker 1: there was a belief that the massive loss of cattle
Speaker 1: would lead to unrest and rebelli and so they decided
Speaker 1: to arm themselves heavily to preempt any signs of an attack.
Speaker 2: Classic I know that's their reaction.
Speaker 1: So when renderpists began killing cattle, early rumors began circulating
Speaker 1: that the render pest was a deliberate poisoning by white
Speaker 1: European colonists. According to reports from the time, it actually
Speaker 1: does seem that the cattle owned by Africans died at
Speaker 1: a much higher rate than those owned by Europeans, and
Speaker 1: while Europeans may not have been deliberately poisoning the cattle,
Speaker 1: there is a lot of evidence that shows that they
Speaker 1: used render pest as an opportunity for further oppression. For instance,
Speaker 1: prior to the Panziwotic, there had been in these reports
Speaker 1: like this, huge complaints about a shortage in laborers to
Speaker 1: work in mines or other European headed industries, and render
Speaker 1: pests coming to wipe out the livelihoods of so many
Speaker 1: Africans viewed as a blessing in disguise by Europeans. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: because with no cattle to rely on, they had to
Speaker 1: find money elsewhere, such as in the mines. That was
Speaker 1: sometimes the only option left.
Speaker 2: Why can humans be so evil to other humans?
Speaker 1: Like I just it gets worse, it don't there and
Speaker 1: it always does, It gets worse and worse. In the
Speaker 1: midst of the Panzolotic the mine owners were like, we're
Speaker 1: going to use this time to reduce the wages by
Speaker 1: thirty percent and increase hours that somebody had to work.
Speaker 1: I quote from the Okay, so this is a quote
Speaker 1: by the president of the mine Manager's Association. The natives
Speaker 1: here have to work because they cannot obtain food otherwise,
Speaker 1: and therefore I think we have a splendid opportunity to
Speaker 1: bring this change into operation. That was about reducing the
Speaker 1: pay and increasing the hours.
Speaker 2: I oh, my god, I.
Speaker 1: I know I have one more go. I have one
Speaker 1: more quote because just to further illustrate the outlook of
Speaker 1: a lot of people who were in charge at the time,
Speaker 1: quote the ravages of the renderpest. Although reducing the natives
Speaker 1: to poverty, have not been without beneficial results, and the
Speaker 1: native has now learnt humility to those to whom he
Speaker 1: is subordinate, and also the lesson that by work only
Speaker 1: can he live. And having learned to work, he is
Speaker 1: now a happy and contented man instead of the discontented, indolent, lazy,
Speaker 1: and besotted being he was when the numerous cattle he
Speaker 1: possessed provided his every want.
Speaker 2: There is so much there, huh. Just boil your blood.
Speaker 1: I know, yeah, it was what it was was seen
Speaker 1: as this opportunity to decrease self reliance of those that
Speaker 1: they wanted to subjugate and.
Speaker 2: Oppress, right, and because if they're not working for you,
Speaker 2: then they're just lazy, lazy slobs, you know. Yep, just
Speaker 2: herting cattle because that's just like the easiest thing to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it really is revealing about the mindsets
Speaker 1: of and the priorities of the people who were in
Speaker 1: charge at this time. Wow, yep. And so European colonists
Speaker 1: further exploited render pests to impoverish Africans, such as in
Speaker 1: South Africa, like when only Africans had to be dipped
Speaker 1: in a solution of carbolic soap at quarantine stations, but
Speaker 1: not white Europeans.
Speaker 2: This is to try and quote combat render pest.
Speaker 1: Huh huh oh no, well, and render pest was claimed
Speaker 1: to be spread only by wagons owned or ridden by Africans,
Speaker 1: so that only their movements were restricted, which meant no
Speaker 1: trade opportunities, deepening their poverty.
Speaker 2: That's logical.
Speaker 1: And then there was the fencing land land, so fences
Speaker 1: were put up to try to restrict to cattle movement
Speaker 1: and create cordons where cattle would not interact. But fencing
Speaker 1: has long been recognized as a way to as paving
Speaker 1: the way for colonial incorporation and land alienation. And then
Speaker 1: there was the militarization of the South African government's anti
Speaker 1: renderpest campaign, which placed arm guards along fences and quarantine stations.
Speaker 1: And finally, one of the biggest problems with this render
Speaker 1: pest epidemic was that the only epidemiological control measures that
Speaker 1: were employed were extremely crude. I mean, there was no
Speaker 1: really other way to do it. You either had to
Speaker 1: kill the cattle that were infected or suspected to be infected,
Speaker 1: or you create these cordons like I mentioned to restrict movement.
Speaker 1: But of course there was no compensation if you had
Speaker 1: to slaughter your cattle, and so farmers often hid infected cattle,
Speaker 1: which worsened the outbreak. And then the slaughter of cattle
Speaker 1: itself also carried some very problematic aspects, since it was
Speaker 1: you usually a white veterinarian going out to tell these
Speaker 1: black farmers that, hey, I know best, right.
Speaker 2: I know best. I'm here to kill all your cattle,
Speaker 2: and with no compensation, in Robbie, of your livelihood. It's fine,
Speaker 2: you'll work in the mines. Don't work, It's fine, it's fine. Yep, yeah,
Speaker 2: you'll be fine. This is good for you.
Speaker 1: And you know, there were times where it appeared that
Speaker 1: the preemptive slaughter of cattle was extreme and designed to
Speaker 1: impoverish the owners and drive them to the labor market
Speaker 1: and increase their dependence on the colonial state. And then
Speaker 1: there was the aspect of missionaries who would seize upon
Speaker 1: this opportunity to show those that they were trying to
Speaker 1: convert that their sins and refusal to follow whatever religion
Speaker 1: they were preaching had led to this plague upon their cattle.
Speaker 1: So it's like, let me strip you of your culture
Speaker 1: and of your livelihood and of any food and security
Speaker 1: and and so on, and then this way I'll have
Speaker 1: complete control over you.
Speaker 2: It's your fault, by the way, because you didn't right
Speaker 2: to the right guy.
Speaker 1: Right, you brought this on way to go. So yes,
Speaker 1: So rinderpest was exploited for further exploitation and subjugation of
Speaker 1: so many of the peoples of Africa. By eighteen ninety six,
Speaker 1: almost all African communities had lost their independence. And I
Speaker 1: think it's reasonable to say that this period, the combination
Speaker 1: of renderpest and drought and smallpox definitely played a role
Speaker 1: in that. Yeah, all right, So now let's shift to
Speaker 1: the ecological side of things.
Speaker 2: Just like depressing on depressing, Like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is, it's depressing on depressing. I think for
Speaker 1: the sociopolitical part, we can look at it as like, hey,
Speaker 1: let's remember how this happened and never do this again
Speaker 1: and identify when people are trying to do this and
Speaker 1: make the future better. And for the ecological side of things,
Speaker 1: I think this is a very fascinating lesson in how interconnected,
Speaker 1: of course, an ecological landscape can be. Yeah, so okay,
Speaker 1: So this sheer loss of wildlife was on a scale
Speaker 1: that could barely be believed. I barely believe it. One
Speaker 1: more quote. The buffalo were chiefly affected, and they had
Speaker 1: come down to the river in thousands to die. Apparently,
Speaker 1: when attacked by the disease, they had become consumed by
Speaker 1: thirst and so congregated at the river, which provided the
Speaker 1: only water supply for many miles. It was a tragic
Speaker 1: site to see all these great creatures dead and dying.
Speaker 1: The stench was nauseating, and one could not have believed
Speaker 1: that there were so many carrion birds in Africa as
Speaker 1: were collected for the feast. Upon our arrival at Ngomeni,
Speaker 1: we found the people in a terrible state of depression,
Speaker 1: for the renderprest epidemic had recently attacked their cattle. This
Speaker 1: area had up to then been probably richer in cattle
Speaker 1: than most of the Kamba country. The fell disease had
Speaker 1: spread with such rapidity that the disposal of the carcasses
Speaker 1: of the cattle was a task beyond their powers, and
Speaker 1: the desiccated remains of tens of thousands of beasts were
Speaker 1: piled up in the form of a wall a few
Speaker 1: yards from the villages, and the air night and day
Speaker 1: was pervaded by a sickly odor of putrefaction. The people
Speaker 1: appeared to be overcome with a hopeless apathy and the
Speaker 1: elders sadly produced a small bunch of about twenty head
Speaker 1: the sole survivors of the Great Herds. That's from eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety one written by Hopey. The death of so many
Speaker 1: animals had incredible cascading effects on the ecosystem, and I
Speaker 1: found a paper that traced these impacts by closely examining
Speaker 1: an area in the Serengetti after winderpest had been eliminated,
Speaker 1: and so in this region, ninety five percent of the cattle, buffalo,
Speaker 1: and wildeby's populations died during the Panzawatic Here's the cascade.
Speaker 1: First came the massive die offs of game animals, livestock
Speaker 1: in human populations. After a brief boom period where premortality
Speaker 1: was super high, Predator populations declined when they could find
Speaker 1: no more food to eat, and then there came reports
Speaker 1: of lions, leopards, jackals, hyenas, other predators attacking humans and
Speaker 1: dragging them off to be eaten. Scavenger populations stayed pretty
Speaker 1: high throughout this whole experience without livestock and wild ungulates
Speaker 1: to brows and grays. Fires then rapidly increased due to
Speaker 1: the excess of tinder, and they grew to such high
Speaker 1: levels that they destroyed trees that would become part of
Speaker 1: the canopy, turning wooded areas into savannah grasslands. Alternatively, what
Speaker 1: happened in some other places was that the death of
Speaker 1: browsers like giraffes that would keep those seedlings and saplings
Speaker 1: small enough to be killed by fire, had almost all died,
Speaker 1: and so then the canopy first grew and then became overcrowded,
Speaker 1: resulting again in self thinning and an even more open
Speaker 1: canopy in arid areas is what that is what would happen,
Speaker 1: and then a more closed woodland in wetter areas.
Speaker 2: Whoa.
Speaker 1: These heavily shaded woodland areas helped along the recovery of
Speaker 1: some gay animals, and that led to a recovery also
Speaker 1: in the tcfly populations, which made it extremely difficult for
Speaker 1: humans to resettle in those places. Yeah. So, render pest
Speaker 1: is often linked to the decline of trapanisamiasis, and then
Speaker 1: as soon as animal populations rebounded, so did trapanasimiasis and
Speaker 1: tcfly populations.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh my gracious mm hmm.
Speaker 1: Depopulation of humans in Lake Victoria basin and then a
Speaker 1: resistance to move back in due to tripanasamiasis may have
Speaker 1: led to elephants to moving into these areas of the park,
Speaker 1: and then as the ecosystem there has recovered and humans
Speaker 1: have once again moved into that space, it creates this
Speaker 1: conflict between humans and elephants. Recovery of wildebeeste and browser
Speaker 1: populations since the elimination of rinderpest has led to a
Speaker 1: decrease in fires now because more grassland is being eaten,
Speaker 1: from one hundred percent of the grasslands in the north
Speaker 1: being burned after the Panzawatic to twenty five percent in
Speaker 1: the recovery years. The recovery of wildebeest has also changed
Speaker 1: the range sizes of smaller grazers like gazelles and zebras.
Speaker 1: When wildebees's populations were low, those smaller grazers had smaller
Speaker 1: ranges because they didn't have to travel as far to
Speaker 1: find food. But now that the wilderbeast are back, researchers
Speaker 1: are finding that they now have to go and travel
Speaker 1: even more extensively to find grazing oh Man. Since the
Speaker 1: elimination of rinder past, the lion and the hyena populations
Speaker 1: have steadily increased, but on the other hand, and I
Speaker 1: find this fascinating. The African wild dog population has decreased
Speaker 1: due to canine distemper, and it has been suggested yet
Speaker 1: yet the increase in canine distemper might be due to
Speaker 1: the elimination of render pest because dogs, these African wild
Speaker 1: dogs may have gotten partial immunity by eating render pest
Speaker 1: infected flesh of those ungulates.
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness, we're going to talk more about that later.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so cool. So render pest reshaped the landscape
Speaker 1: of so many parts of Africa, and it's eradication is
Speaker 1: allowing us to get a glimpse of what it was
Speaker 1: like before the disease swept through. It's very interesting. I
Speaker 1: don't know if it'll go back to what it once was.
Speaker 1: So many other things have changed, but it's really interesting.
Speaker 2: It is that is really fascinating. It's it's incredible that
Speaker 2: it had such wide ranging effects, you know what I mean,
Speaker 2: like literally changing the physical landscape, like.
Speaker 1: The physical landscape, the social landscape, the political landscape. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's really it's one of the It's this is
Speaker 1: why I say it's like the smallpox of cattle, the
Speaker 1: Great African panzolotic of render pest was not the last
Speaker 1: time that render pest would be an issue, not there
Speaker 1: not in the rest of the world, not by a
Speaker 1: long shot. Throughout the twentieth century, outbreaks continued to occur,
Speaker 1: and the disease also popped up in Brazil after infected
Speaker 1: cattle were imported, but nowhere else in North or South America.
Speaker 1: The development of an effective vaccine and large scale immunization
Speaker 1: campaigns led to the last big outbreaks occurring periodically in
Speaker 1: the first half of the twentieth century and then turning
Speaker 1: into small, more isolated instances with a few larger epidemics
Speaker 1: into the eighties. The last confirmed case of render pest
Speaker 1: was reported in Kenya in two thousand and one, and
Speaker 1: on May twenty fifth, twenty eleven, render pest was declared
Speaker 1: to be the second disease eradicated.
Speaker 2: Wow, why did it take ten years before they declared
Speaker 2: it eradicated? Were they just like waiting and surveilling to
Speaker 2: make sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I can tell is that they just
Speaker 1: kept because I would imagine because it's different than in
Speaker 1: human eradication, Like even with human there was a delay, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: but the surveillance I think is easier than with you know,
Speaker 1: these massive herds of wild angilas that don't readily come
Speaker 1: to you know, immunization stations, right, you.
Speaker 2: Can't just call their doctor's office. Yeah, any cases of
Speaker 2: render pest this year?
Speaker 1: No? Great, Well, Aaron, that's all I've got for the history.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, so wow, it ended, It ended.
Speaker 1: I know, I breezed through the whole vaccine things because
Speaker 1: I just was like, I wanted to focus on the panziwatic.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, great, we'll talk a little bit about the
Speaker 2: vaccine then that's great.
Speaker 1: Awesome, all right, so catch me up. What's going on
Speaker 1: now with this eradicated disease? I love too.
Speaker 2: We'll take a quick break first. Okay, so we've eradicated
Speaker 2: render pest we have, which means we don't have to
Speaker 2: worry about it anymore technically. And like you mentioned, Aaron,
Speaker 2: while this is now a virus that exists only in
Speaker 2: laboratory stocks, many labs, including in twenty nineteen a UK
Speaker 2: lab that had the largest stocks of renderpest virus, has
Speaker 2: destroyed their stocks. So in theory, if everyone destroyed their stocks,
Speaker 2: this virus would be eliminated from the earth, which is great.
Speaker 2: Let's hope that that happens. It's really really interesting that
Speaker 2: it appears that infection with one of these morbiliviruses, for example, measles,
Speaker 2: actually confers protection to all the other groups of morbiliviruses
Speaker 2: for the most.
Speaker 1: Part, which is super cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was a study where they injected a cow
Speaker 2: with a measles vaccine and then that cow didn't get
Speaker 2: render pested when they challenged it. So like you could
Speaker 2: have protected cows with the measles vaccine instead of the
Speaker 2: render pest vaccine in theory. So there is not just
Speaker 2: a potential increase in canine distemper virus. I actually didn't
Speaker 2: even read about that in wild dogs. That's fascinating. There's
Speaker 2: another ungulate morbilivirus that is the PPR.
Speaker 1: Oh, yes, little pit I just think like little cute,
Speaker 1: little ruminants.
Speaker 2: Cute little ruminant plague. Okay, So this is a very
Speaker 2: closely related to render pest virus that causes disease in
Speaker 2: sheep and goats. It does not appear to cause disease
Speaker 2: in cattle or other ungulants, even though it is possible
Speaker 2: that they can get infected at least experimentally, but they
Speaker 2: don't tend to have clinical disease even if they could
Speaker 2: potentially then transmit it. So there has been an increase
Speaker 2: in PPR spread documented since the eradication of RPV renderpest virus,
Speaker 2: and because the surveillance systems for RPV were so in
Speaker 2: place already, we've been able to actually detect this where
Speaker 2: we might not have otherwise.
Speaker 1: That's very interesting, right, Yeah, And so it's thought that
Speaker 1: it is this eradication of RPV, and not just the eradication,
Speaker 1: but the cessation of the vaccination campaigns which had to
Speaker 1: happen in order to finish the eradication campaign of renderpest virus.
Speaker 2: They actually stopped vaccinating early so that they could detect
Speaker 2: if there were outbreaks m H. And so it's thought
Speaker 2: that that cessation of vaccination meant no more protection even
Speaker 2: in cattle from PPR, So then that facilitated the spread.
Speaker 1: Isn't that fasct It is very fascinating.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So let's talk a little bit about some
Speaker 2: of the lessons that we can learn about this eradication,
Speaker 2: especially because since render pest is so closely related to
Speaker 2: measles virus, it shares a lot of commonalities a lot
Speaker 2: of people and there are several papers that kind of say,
Speaker 2: what lessons can we learn from the render pest eradication
Speaker 2: that we could maybe apply to trying to eradicate measles.
Speaker 2: So a few things really facilitated the eradication efforts to
Speaker 2: actually kind of come to fruition. Right. First is that
Speaker 2: we had a really good vaccine. So I didn't dig
Speaker 2: into the history of like how this vaccine was developed.
Speaker 2: It was made in cows. I know it was a
Speaker 2: live attenuated vaccine. And here are some of the things
Speaker 2: that were really great about it. First is it was
Speaker 2: extremely effective in a single dose. It was never associated
Speaker 2: with any adverse reactions supposedly, and one single dose in
Speaker 2: a cow was immunogetic and provided essentially lifelong immunity.
Speaker 1: Wow, and that's that's what I took.
Speaker 2: That's the unicorn, right, it's a unicorn vaccine, but the
Speaker 2: very first vaccine. The biggest challenge with it was that
Speaker 2: it was a live virus vaccine, which meant that it
Speaker 2: required cold storage and it had to always be transported
Speaker 2: in cold storage in order to be effective, essentially right
Speaker 2: to ke keep it alive. So eventually they developed a
Speaker 2: shelf stable formulation and that was honestly super important in
Speaker 2: these eradication efforts because it meant that you could keep it,
Speaker 2: i think for one month at like ambient temperatures, and
Speaker 2: that means that you could transport it a lot more easily,
Speaker 2: even in places where you didn't have access to refrigeration.
Speaker 2: Another thing that became really essential in the eradication efforts
Speaker 2: was involvement of community stakeholders. And I think that that
Speaker 2: makes a lot of sense in the context of the
Speaker 2: history that we just heard about. Right, this is a
Speaker 2: disease that historically was very fraught politically, right, and caused
Speaker 2: a lot of a lot of issues, And so eventually
Speaker 2: people figured out that you couldn't just have veterinarians come
Speaker 2: in and kind of take over and tell people what
Speaker 2: they had to do with their cattle herds, right. That
Speaker 2: didn't work very well. So eventually they involved community based
Speaker 2: animal healthcare workers and that proved to be really essential,
Speaker 2: training people from the community to be able to go
Speaker 2: out and give these vaccines essentially rather than relying on
Speaker 2: government vaccination programs.
Speaker 1: Awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then the last thing was good epidymiological or
Speaker 2: epi zoological studies to monitor, surveil and model what outbreaks
Speaker 2: could look like to be able to get a handle on,
Speaker 2: you know, surveillance and reducing the overall spread. And so
Speaker 2: some of these things we can do for humans, and
Speaker 2: some of them are a little bit more difficult.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So with surveillance in cattle, once you would identify in
Speaker 2: a population, quarantine and vaccination or in some cases culling
Speaker 2: of the herd would be effective in reducing the spread
Speaker 2: of that illness. With human diseases like measles, that's a
Speaker 2: lot more difficult to do, right, Not only because you
Speaker 2: can't cull here humans. Oh my god, Okay, sorry, do
Speaker 2: I have to say that, I don't know, but it's
Speaker 2: more difficult to quarantine humans for so many reasons. But
Speaker 2: we also just move a lot more than cattle do, right.
Speaker 2: Cattle are we put them in herds and that's kind
Speaker 2: of where they remain. It's a little bit more complicated
Speaker 2: with wildlife that come in out, but with humans, we
Speaker 2: can get on a plane and travel. And now measles
Speaker 2: is in three different countries, so it's a lot easier
Speaker 2: in that way to target an animal disease like this.
Speaker 2: But that doesn't mean that it's impossible. And I think
Speaker 2: especially this like shelf stable vaccine, which as far as
Speaker 2: I know, we still don't have for measles. It still
Speaker 2: is a cold storage vaccine. And involvement of community stakeholders,
Speaker 2: I think are the things that are going to be
Speaker 2: most important in trying to eradicate any human illness. And
Speaker 2: I think these are lessons that we can learn from
Speaker 2: Render Pest perfect. I love it well.
Speaker 1: I for one, am very glad that we A did
Speaker 1: this episode and b that renderpest is eradicated. Oh same man, Okay,
Speaker 1: all right, Time for sources, I guess so sources. So
Speaker 1: I relied on a few different sources and I'll post
Speaker 1: all of these on the this podcast will Kill You
Speaker 1: dot com website. I read Cattle Plague, a history by C. A. Spinach.
Speaker 1: One of the other ones that I really liked was
Speaker 1: a book called Renderpest and PPR Virus Plagues of Large
Speaker 1: and Small ruminants Arian.
Speaker 2: That's the book I used.
Speaker 1: It's still good. Yeah. I saw that you had downloaded it,
Speaker 1: and I was like, all right, because I had downloaded
Speaker 1: it separately, and then I was like, oh wait, it's
Speaker 1: in there twice. Okay, Yeah, it's good. It had so
Speaker 1: much information.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was really phenomenon.
Speaker 1: And there are two more that I want to briefly
Speaker 1: shout out. One is by McNaughton in nineteen ninety two,
Speaker 1: The Propagation of Disturbance and Savannahs through food webs And
Speaker 1: finally by Fufolo nineteen ninety three, Epidemics and Revolutions the
Speaker 1: rinderpest epidemic in late nineteenth century Southern Africa.
Speaker 2: Awesome. Yeah, I loved that book that you recommended. I'm
Speaker 2: sure we read different chapters. I also used heavily another
Speaker 2: book that you downloaded Aaron the chapter renderpest Virus in
Speaker 2: the book. We're not going to say the title, it's
Speaker 2: too long, but it's by Walter Plowright, who's one of
Speaker 2: the big names in RPV research in general. And then
Speaker 2: a few papers that we will post on our website.
Speaker 2: This podcast will kill you dot com. You can find
Speaker 2: the sources for this episode and every single one of
Speaker 2: our episodes there.
Speaker 1: You sure can.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Walter Plowite was one of the biggest leaders in the
Speaker 1: eradication campaign, and he died just before it was declared eradicated,
Speaker 1: but it was basically it was in twenty ten, so
Speaker 1: he kind of knew. He was like I did it.
Speaker 1: We did it, we did it, we did anyway. Group
Speaker 1: effort for sure. Thank you to Blodmobile for providing the
Speaker 1: music for this episode and all of our episodes.
Speaker 2: And thank you listeners for sticking with us. I hope
Speaker 2: you enjoyed this cattle, but not only cattle episode.
Speaker 1: Yes, thank you, Thank you always, and until next time,
Speaker 1: wash your hands
Speaker 2: You filthy animals.