Race to Stamp out Animal Plague Begins Killer Disease That Is Scourge of World’S Poorest Ruminant Farmers Is Ripe for Elimination
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NEWS IN FOCUS CLIMATOLOGY Climate scientists BIOTECHNOLOGY Synthetic AFRICAN SCIENCE Regional CAREERS What the future attempt to lure talented biologists write the rules for hub will provide holds for a growing physicists p.140 living machines p.141 research autonomy p.142 postdoc population p.144 AMI VITALE/FAO Goats and sheep are sold frequently, which could challenge the vaccination effort against peste des petits ruminants. DISEASE ERADICATION Race to stamp out animal plague begins Killer disease that is scourge of world’s poorest ruminant farmers is ripe for elimination. BY EWEN CALLAWAY to eradicate by 2030 the sheep and goat virus, which once threatened the livelihoods of cattle which is known as PPR — an abbreviation of its herders, especially those in Africa. Causing umanity wiped out smallpox in 1980 French name, peste des petits ruminants. PPR high fever, diarrhoea and lesions in the mouths and the cattle virus rinderpest in 2011. eradication is technically feasible, say animal- of sheep and goats, PPR is highly infectious Polio stands on the brink of eradica- health specialists, but it is uncertain where the and kills 30–70% of the animals it infects. It Htion, with just 21 cases recorded this year effort’s organization and billions of dollars of is endemic across northern, central and west worldwide. Now, health officials have launched necessary funding will come from. Africa and south Asia, and it has more recently a global effort to vanquish yet another disease “This is an exercise in persuading the world taken hold in China and Turkey. — a sheep- and goat-killer that is little known community and funders that this work could The UN puts the economic costs of PPR at in rich countries, but creates economic ruin for and should be done,” says Jeffrey Mariner, an between US$1.5 billion and $2.1 billion per the world’s poorest people. epidemiologist at Tufts University veterinary year, a burden borne by some of the world’s A conference hosted by the United Nations school in North Grafton, Massachusetts, who poorest people, who rely on sheep and goats in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, from 31 March to attended the meeting. for food and income (see ‘Cost of a goat- 2 April, marked the roll out of a global campaign PPR is related to measles and rinderpest, killer’). “Sheep and goats are the cattle of 9 APRIL 2015 | VOL 520 | NATURE | 139 © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved NEWS IN FOCUS the poor, and they are the bank for the animal disease can be eliminated for good. spreading, but veterinary services are weak in poor,” says Bernard Vallat, director-general of “Before everybody forgets that, people want to many of those regions. World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) get the rest of the world on board,” says Baron. One positive effect of the campaign will be in Paris, which co-hosted the meeting. PPR eradication presents its own challenges. the construction of veterinary infrastructure “Somebody in Kenya said to me, ‘if the The campaign strategy focuses on dramatically in these areas. This will have impacts beyond goats die, the children don’t go to school’,” says PPR, for example by helping to combat other Michael Baron, a virologist at the Pirbright small ruminant diseases, such as goat and Institute in Woking, UK. Sheep and goat herd- COST OF A GOAT-KILLER sheep pox. “There should be good knock-on ing also helps many women in the developing The virus peste des petits ruminants, or PPR, effects for poor people,” says Baron. costs farmers in lost production and livestock, world to attain self-sufficiency. and in caring for or vaccinating goats and sheep. How exactly the eradication effort will be PPR ticks many of the boxes needed for an coordinated has yet to be hashed out. The UN SOURCE: OIE/FAO eradication campaign: an effective vaccine has Africa Food and Agriculture Organization, which been available for decades, and scientists have South Asia co-organized the Abidjan meeting, and the created formulations that remain effective OIE are looking for Western governments, for weeks without refrigeration. Diagnostic East Asia non-governmental organizations and charities tools, including some that can be used in ani- Middle East to foot much of the estimated cost of $7.6 bil- mal pens, are accurate. There also seems to be lion to $9.1 billion. no wild reservoir from which the virus may West Eurasia Samuel Thevasagayam, deputy director for rebound once wiped out from domestic flocks 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 livestock at the Bill & Melinda Gates Founda- and herds. “It’s one of those no-brainers,” says Annual estimated impact of PPR (US$ millions) tion in Seattle, Washington, which has con- Christopher Oura, a veterinary virologist at the tributed funds to PPR vaccine efforts in the University of the West Indies in St Augustine, past, says that the organization is evaluating Trinidad, who studies PPR. “The tools are out ramping up and coordinating vaccinations, but whether to support the campaign. “It’s a huge there to eradicate the virus.” this is complicated because sheep and goats commitment — that’s what causes donors A cost–benefit analysis by Mariner and his are more abundant than cattle in most of the to think carefully,” says Mariner. He hopes colleagues estimated that eradication will save developing world, and people hold onto them that the management structure that emerges more than $42 billion over a hundred years. for a shorter time before selling or slaughter- will be nimble and open to new ideas and The fresh success of the rinderpest eradication ing them. The campaign will also attempt to approaches.“With PPR, we’re going to have to campaign also gives many hope that a second systematically target areas where the virus is continue to innovate,” he says. ■ CLIMATE SCIENCE is an inadvertent result of pressure on clima- tologists to convey a simple message to the pub- lic — for instance, that all dry regions will get dryer and all wet regions wetter in a warming Physicists, your climate, says Piers Forster, a climate modeller at the University of Leeds, UK. That has made the science “sound somewhat dull”, he says. “We too quickly turn to the policy implica- planet needs you tions of our work and forget the basic science,” adds Bjorn Stevens, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Climatologists highlight cloud mysteries in an attempt to Germany, and a co-author of the Nature Geosci- lure physicists to their field. ence paper. Although climate scientists agree on the basics — for example, climate change is primarily the result of human activity — large BY QUIRIN SCHIERMEIER To attract physics and mathematics students uncertainties persist in ‘climate sensitivity’, the to the speciality, Bony and her collaborators increase in average global temperature caused limate science needs more mathemati- have presented some of the field’s grand chal- by a given rise in the concentration of carbon cians and physicists. So say prominent lenges in magazines such as Physics Today dioxide. climatologists who are trying to spark (B. Stevens and S. Bony Phys. Today http://doi. As Bony and co-authors argue, understand- Centhusiasm for their field in budding research- org/3f9; 2013), and are organizing summer ing how the warming climate might affect ers who might otherwise choose astrophysics schools for students from an array of scientific cloud cover, which influences the amount of or cosmology. Talented physical scientists backgrounds. sunlight reflected back into space and thus are needed to help resolve mysteries that are Last week in Nature Geoscience, Bony’s team Earth’s energy cycle, is key to addressing these crucial to modelling the climate — and, poten- outlined four of the field’s deepest questions, uncertainties. A major weakness of current cli- tially, saving the planet — the group says, such including how clouds and climate interact and mate models is their limited ability to simulate as the ways in which clouds are formed. how the position of tropical rain belts and mid- the convection by which humid air is lifted into There is a misconception that the major latitude storm tracks might change in a warm- the atmosphere and which drives cloud forma- challenges in physical climate science are ing world (S. Bony et al. Nature Geosci. http:// tion and rainfall. In some instances, the models settled. “That’s absolutely not true,” says doi.org/3gb; 2015). The questions are best cannot even agree on whether the future will Sandrine Bony, a climate researcher at the tackled, says Bony, by creating more realistic bring more rain or less. Laboratory of Dynamic Meteorology in Paris. climate simulations — an approach that she Building better cloud-resolving models “In fact, essential physical aspects of climate hopes will appeal to physicists. requires enormous computer power, as well change are poorly understood.” The perception that climate science is ‘solved’ as people who have a deep understanding of 140 | NATURE | VOL 520 | 9 APRIL 2015 © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.