2. THE HISTORY OF RINDERPEST: THE SETTING FOR GLOBAL ERADICATION

Early History and the Freeing of Europe The written record of rinderpest occurrence in the world is relatively sparse in recent years, making it difficult to discern epidemiological patterns from recorded events; the overall picture of viral persistence is obscured by long-lived epidemic, even pandemic, waves of infection interspersed with periods of apparent disease absence. Generally, only exceptional events are reported and this was especially so in the modern era where reporting rinderpest occurrence came to be a sensitive issue because of its impact on international livestock trade. However, combining recorded history with an understanding of “grey literature” can provide insights into epidemiological patterns within the overall picture of viral persistence. Readers wishing for more detail on the epidemiology and the history of rinderpest occurrence and control should refer to the Rinderpest and PPR monograph edited by Thomas Barrett, Paul-Pierre Pastoret, and William Taylor (2006), and the detailed account published by Spinage (2003). Waging war was a potent means of spreading rinderpest around and between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The large cattle herds travelling in the van of marauding armies were husbanded to feed the soldiers and provide draft power for their baggage trains or were amassed as the spoils of war for the victorious soldiers returning home. Repeatedly from as early as the fourth century until well into the twentieth century, rinderpest was spread by military campaigns. The Huns and Mongol invaders brought the disease from its homeland somewhere in the east of Asia into Europe. Asian Grey Steppe oxen were remarkably resistant to the effects of rinderpest and large herds could shed the rinderpest virus for months and provoke epidemics that devastated the cattle and buffalo herds of the invaded countries (Scott 2000). Baghdadlis—the name given to cattle traded to Egypt from Iraq during the early twentieth century, a huge trade—were similarly notorious for introducing rinderpest without themselves being seriously affected (Littlewood 1905). War and civil disturbance continued to spread rinderpest until the late twentieth century: the Israeli and Syrian armies withdrawing from Lebanon in the early 1970s took rinderpest with looted cattle into their own countries; goats were incriminated in the inadvertent transfer by the Indian peacekeeping forces in 1978 of rinderpest to Sri Lanka, which had been free of the disease for 30 years; and, the civil disturbance caused by the Gulf War resulted in a major upsurge of infection in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq in the early 1990s. The looting and social disruption of war was not alone in spreading rinderpest. Increasingly in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, it was organized trade in cattle, largely from Russia, that repeatedly introduced rinderpest into recipient countries in Europe and elsewhere where, increasingly, it was spread by trade in livestock that was meant to feed the populations of the burgeoning cities. The “Russian disease” spread not only because of trade in cattle for meat per se but also as an indirect result of trade in corn transported in massive quantities by ox-drawn carts (Spinage 2003). The development of steam power in the nineteenth century enabled the shipment of live cattle by rail and sea in numbers previously impossible and, as a result of rinderpest, from 1857 to 1866 Europe was denuded of cattle. Throughout the centuries, rinderpest pandemics raged across Europe from the Mediterranean and the Levant in the south and the Scandinavian countries in the north, and from Ireland in the west to Moscow in the east. For many centuries no European country was consistently free from rinderpest. A particularly severe European pandemic of cattle plague evolved over several years in the early eighteenth century and extended from Western Europe to Moscow and south to Italy, possibly originating there through cattle trade from Hungary to Dalmatia. To quote Spinage (2003), “There were many suggestions as to its origin in the countries affected, but for centuries, the herds of Venice and Lombardy had suffered invasions through commerce in cattle across the Adriatic.” and “the outbreak of this plague in 1709 caused even greater terror in man than did the Black Death from which the populations of Europe were only just recovering....” This catastrophe was matched by another pandemic that lasted for a decade from

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