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Rinderpest is a highly contagious viral disease that affects ungulates such as cattle, buffalo, yak, and various wildlife species, leading to significant morbidity and mortality. The global eradication of rinderpest was successfully accomplished in 2011 through extensive vaccination efforts. Today, safeguarding against the re-emergence of rinderpest in animal populations is paramount. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Organization for Animal Health are entrusted through a series of resolutions with the responsibility to prevent the re-emergence of rinderpest in animals., Competing Interests: Disclosure The authors have nothing to disclose., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

In 2021, the world marked 10 years free from rinderpest. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and World Organisation for Animal Health have since made great strides in consolidating, sequencing, and destroying stocks of rinderpest virus-containing material, currently kept by only 14 known institutions. This progress must continue.

Rinderpest, the most dreaded disease of cattle, originated as far back as the domestication of cattle, occurring in Asia more than 10,000 years ago. It has been the main preoccupation of Veterinary Service activities for many centuries and was the major motivation for establishing the first veterinary school in Lyon, France, in 1761. Gaining control of the disease was the impetus for the founding of many regional and international organisations (including the World Organisation for Animal Health). Outbreaks of rinderpest have led to food shortages and starvation, economic losses and poverty, social unrest, and disrupted transport networks in regions where agriculture was dependent on draught cattle. The rinderpest virus, causative agent of the disease, has also been used as a biological weapon in the past. Many regional rinderpest eradication campaigns have been implemented, including Joint Project 15; the Pan-African Rinderpest Campaign (PARC); the South Asia Rinderpest Eradication Campaign; the West Asia Rinderpest Eradication Campaign; and the Pan African Programme for the Control of Epizootics. All of these campaigns were supported by regional and international organisations, and the disease was finally eradicated in 2011. The benefit of PARC in terms of the value of avoided losses in cattle products due to the decrease in the disease's occurrence was estimated to be between 581,000 and 35,433,000 European currency units. Currently, the world is prepared to prevent the deliberate or accidental release of the remaining infectious rinderpest virus material which exists in research and diagnostic facilities across the world.

In 2011, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) declared global freedom from rinderpest, formally announcing that rinderpest virus infections had been eliminated from susceptible livestock populations. At the same time, it was recognised that rinderpest virus, and material containing rinderpest virus, remained stored in an unspecified number of facilities across the world. Although natural infections had been eliminated, there remained a risk that rinderpest could reoccur if such infectious material accidentally leaked or was intentionally released from one of these facilities into a susceptible animal population. To minimise this risk, the OIE and FAO, with the support of international partners, set in place a framework to: reduce the quantity of remaining rinderpest-virus-containing material; ensure that such material was only stored in high-security facilities; regulate any handling or manipulation of the virus; maintain vigilance amongst livestock keepers and Veterinary Services in the post-eradication era; and develop contingency plans to deal with any suspected or actual reoccurrence of rinderpest disease. In 2016, five years after the declaration of global freedom from rinderpest, official reports to the OIE show that virus and virus-containing material remain stored in 21 countries worldwide in 22 separate facilities, of which only five have been inspected and approved for holding rinderpest virus or vaccine. There is still much work to be done to further reduce the risk of a reoccurrence.

An effective and efficient disease prevention and control strategy is of paramount importance to improve the quality and quantity of livestock production in the Indian context. Although livestock vaccination is considered an emerging innovation of socioeconomic importance in the Indian dairy industry, the rate of adoption and diffusion of vaccination technology is very low at field level. In this context, the authors examined the efforts of the Government of India to protect livestock health and control disease, considered the lessons learnt from rinderpest eradication, looked at field practices and the reality on the ground, and studied the perceptions of multiple stakeholders with regards to the relevance, profitability and sustainability of vaccination. In this study, the authors consider policy implications for the Indian dairy industry using the responses of 360 dairy farmers, 80 research scientists and 40 extension workers in India. The study revealed that scientists and extension experts rated vaccination highly in terms of its relevance, profitability and sustainability, while the perception of farmers was less favourable. The study also observed that, even after implementation of various disease control programmes with heavy financial expenditure, there was a wide gap between farmers and scientists and between farmers and extension workers with regards to their perceptions of the relevance, profitability and sustainability of vaccination, while the gap was very narrow between scientists and extension workers. It can be concluded, therefore, that there is a need to generate innovations for disease control that are perceived as relevant, profitable and sustainable so as to encourage higher levels of diffusion and adoption at field level. This study recommends that farmers partner with researchers and extension workers to ensure effective generation and transfer of new dairying technologies, leading to higher production and productivity in the Indian dairy sector., (© OIE (World Organisation for Animal Health), 2016.)

The measurement of virus-specific neutralising antibodies represents the "gold-standard" for diagnostic serology. For animal morbilliviruses, such as peste des petits ruminants (PPRV) or rinderpest virus (RPV), live virus-based neutralisation tests require high-level biocontainment to prevent the accidental escape of the infectious agents. In this study, we describe the adaptation of a replication-defective vesicular stomatitis virus (VSVΔG) based pseudotyping system for the measurement of neutralising antibodies against animal morbilliviruses. By expressing the haemagglutinin (H) and fusion (F) proteins of PPRV on VSVΔG pseudotypes bearing a luciferase marker gene, neutralising antibody titres could be measured rapidly and with high sensitivity. Serological responses against the four distinct lineages of PPRV could be measured simultaneously and cross-neutralising responses against other morbilliviruses compared. Using this approach, we observed that titres of neutralising antibodies induced by vaccination with live attenuated PPRV were lower than those induced by wild type virus infection and the level of cross-lineage neutralisation varied between vaccinates. By comparing neutralising responses from animals infected with either PPRV or RPV, we found that responses were highest against the homologous virus, indicating that retrospective analyses of serum samples could be used to confirm the nature of the original pathogen to which an animal had been exposed. Accordingly, when screening sera from domestic livestock and wild ruminants in Tanzania, we detected evidence of cross-species infection with PPRV, canine distemper virus (CDV) and a RPV-related bovine morbillivirus, suggesting that exposure to animal morbilliviruses may be more widespread than indicated previously using existing diagnostic techniques., (Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Unlabelled: Although rinderpest virus (RPV) has been eradicated in the wild, efforts are still continuing to restrict the extent to which live virus is distributed in facilities around the world and to prepare for any reappearance of the disease, whether through deliberate or accidental release. In an effort to find an alternative vaccine which could be used in place of the traditional live attenuated RPV strains, we have determined whether cattle can be protected from rinderpest by inoculation with vaccine strains of the related morbillivirus, peste des petits ruminants virus (PPRV). Cattle were vaccinated with wild-type PPRV or either of two established PPRV vaccine strains, Nigeria/75/1 or Sungri/96. All animals developed antibody and T cell immune responses to the inoculated PPRV. However, only the animals given wild-type PPRV were protected from RPV challenge. Animals given PPRV/Sungri/96 were only partially protected, and animals given PPRV/Nigeria/75/1 showed no protection against RPV challenge. While sera from animals vaccinated with the vaccine strain of RPV showed cross-neutralizing ability against PPRV, none of the sera from animals vaccinated with any strain of PPRV was able to neutralize RPV although sera from animals inoculated with wild-type PPRV were able to neutralize RPV-pseudotyped vesicular stomatitis virus., Importance: Rinderpest virus has been eradicated, and it is only the second virus for which this is so. Significant efforts are still required to ensure preparedness for a possible escape of RPV from a laboratory or its deliberate release. Since RPV vaccine protects sheep and goats from PPRV, it is important to determine if the reverse is true as this would provide a non-RPV vaccine for dealing with suspected RPV outbreaks. This is probably the last in vivo study with live RPV that will be approved., (Copyright © 2016 Holzer et al.)

Scholarship on the Tanzanian Rinderpest epizootic of the 1890s has assumed that German colonizers understood from the start that they were confronting the same disease that had afflicted Eurasia for centuries. Outward indicators of the epizootic, known locally as sadoka, especially wildlife destruction, were unknown in Europe, leading German veterinarians to doubt that the African disease was Rinderpest. Financial constraints and conflicting development agendas, especially tension between ranching and pastoralism, deterred early colonial applications of veterinary science that might have led to an early diagnosis. European veterinarians, guarding their authority against medical researchers, opposed inoculation therapies in the case of Rinderpest in favor of veterinary policing despite recent breakthroughs in vaccine research. The virus was not identified before reaching South Africa in 1896, but this breakthrough had little influence on policy in East Africa. Yet emergent international disease conventions directed at bubonic plague entangled with veterinary policy in East Africa.

In 2011, ten years after the last reported outbreak, the eradication of rinderpest was declared. However, as rinderpest virus stocks still exist, there remains a risk of rinderpest re-introduction. A semi-quantitative risk assessment was conducted to assess this risk, which was defined as the probability of at least one host becoming infected and infectious outside a laboratory anywhere in the world within a one-year period. Pathways leading to rinderpest re-introduction were: deliberate or accidental use of virus in laboratories, deliberate or accidental use of vaccines, host exposure to an environmental source of virus, and use of virus for anti-animal biological warfare. The probability of each pathway step occurring was estimated through expert opinion elicitation. The risk estimate was associated with a high degree of uncertainty. It was estimated to range from negligible to high, with the median being very low. The accidental use of laboratory virus stocks was the highest risk pathway. Reducing the number of virus stocks and restricting their use, as well as upgrading the laboratories to a higher biosafety level, would effectively decrease the maximum and median risks. Likewise, ensuring that remaining vaccine stocks are not used and are instead destroyed or relocated to a limited number of regional repositories would also have a major effect on these estimates. However, these measures are unlikely to eliminate the risk of rinderpest re-introduction so that maintaining response preparedness is essential., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

This article gives a short review about the history of the control and finally eradication of Rinderpest, as only the second infectious disease in history. Emphasis is put on the 20th century. Beside the application of classical hygienic control measures, the development of appropriate diagnostic tools and of improved vaccines in conjunction with national and internationally coordinated actions, were pivotal for the eradication success. It is discussed which lessons are to be learned from this achievement--and what may be the next candidates for eradication.

Rinderpest was a devastating disease of livestock responsible for continent-wide famine and poverty. Centuries of veterinary advances culminated in 2011 with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Organization for Animal Health declaring global eradication of rinderpest; only the second disease to be eradicated and the greatest veterinary achievement of our time. Conventional control measures, principally mass vaccination combined with zoosanitary procedures, led to substantial declines in the incidence of rinderpest. However, during the past decades, innovative strategies were deployed for the last mile to overcome diagnostic and surveillance challenges, unanticipated variations in virus pathogenicity, circulation of disease in wildlife populations and to service remote and nomadic communities in often-unstable states. This review provides an overview of these challenges, describes how they were overcome and identifies key factors for this success.

In 2011, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) officially declared rinderpest eradicated. This cattle virus, which has historically had significant political, economic, and social consequences, is only the second infectious disease to disappear from the face of the planet due to concerted human actions. This paper explores the effects that rinderpest has had historically, chronicles the actions of the Global Rinderpest Eradication Campaign (GREP), and discusses the lessons that GREP can offer for combating other infectious diseases. I argue that rinderpest's unique viral characteristics made eradication particularly feasible, but that GREP's activities offer important lessons for fostering international cooperation on controlling infectious disease outbreaks.

After the 2011 declaration of rinderpest disease eradication, we surveyed 150 countries about rinderpest virus stocks. Forty-four laboratories in 35 countries held laboratory-attenuated strains, field strains, or diagnostic samples. Vaccine and reagent production and laboratory experiments continued. Rigorous standards are necessary to ensure that stocks are kept under safe conditions.

In 2011, the 79th General Session of the World Assembly of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the 37th Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAD) Conference adopted a resolution declaring the world free from rinderpest and recommending follow-up measures to preserve the benefits of this new and hard-won situation. Eradication is an achievable objective for any livestock disease, provided that the epidemiology is uncomplicated and the necessary tools, resources and policies are available. Eradication at a national level inevitably reflects national priorities, whereas global eradication requires a level of international initiative and leadership to integrate these tools into a global framework, aimed first at suppressing transmission across all infected areas and concluding with a demonstration thatthis has been achieved. With a simple transmission chain and the environmental fragility of the virus, rinderpest has always been open to control and even eradication within a zoosanitary approach. However, in the post-1945 drive for more productive agriculture, national and global vaccination programmes became increasingly relevant and important. As rinderpest frequently spread from one region to another through trade-related livestock movements, the key to global eradication was to ensure that such vaccination programmes were carried out in a synchronised manner across all regions where the disease was endemic - an objective to which the European Union, the United States Agency for International Development, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the African Union-Interafrican Bureau of Animal Resources, FA0 and OIE fully subscribed. This article provides a review of rinderpest eradication, from the seminal work carried out by Giovanni Lancisi in the early 18th Century to the global declaration in 2011.

Rinderpest is only the second infectious disease to have been globally eradicated. In the final stages of eradication, the virus was entrenched in pastoral areas of the Greater Horn of Africa, a region with weak governance, poor security, and little infrastructure that presented profound challenges to conventional control methods. Although the eradication process was a development activity rather than scientific research, its success owed much to several seminal research efforts in vaccine development and epidemiology and showed what scientific decision-making and management could accomplish with limited resources. The keys to success were the development of a thermostable vaccine and the application of participatory epidemiological techniques that allowed veterinary personnel to interact at a grassroots level with cattle herders to more effectively target control measures.

The global eradication of rinderpest was declared in 2011. This is the second infectious disease to have been eradicated from the world after smallpox, for which eradication was declared in 1980. From a scientific aspect, smallpox eradication was achieved by improvements in the Jenner vaccine, originally developed in the 18th century. Developments in vaccine technology and virological techniques during the 20th century have contributed to the eradication of rinderpest. The scientific background to rinderpest eradication is briefly reviewed vis-à-vis that of smallpox eradication., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

In 2011 the Food and Agriculture Organization formally announced that rinderpest was eradicated from the globe. Rinderpest virus had long been associated with huge disease outbreaks among cattle. The disease not only had a devastating effect on cattle herds world-wide, but also on human populations that depended on them. Rinderpest virus - a member of the genus Morbillivirus of the family Paramyxoviridae - is a close relative of measles virus. Both viruses are highly infectious and share many other biological properties. Although no formal goal or timeframe has been set, plans are currently being developed to eradicate measles. Here, we discuss how lessons learned from the global eradication of rinderpest may help in the future eradication of measles., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Until the middle of the 19th century, very few references exist regarding the occurrence of animal diseases in Namibia. With the introduction of contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP) in 1859, this picture changed completely and livestock owners implemented various forms of disease control in an effort to contain the spread of this disease and minimise its devastating effects. After the establishment of the colonial administration in 1884, the first animal disease legislation was introduced in 1887 and the first veterinarian, Dr Wilhelm Rickmann, arrived in 1894. CBPP and the outbreak of rinderpest in 1897 necessitated a greatly expanded veterinary infrastructure and the first veterinary laboratory was erected at Gammams near Windhoek in 1897. To prevent the spread of rinderpest, a veterinary cordon line was established, which was the very beginning of the Veterinary Cordon Fence as it is known today. After the First World War, a small but dedicated corps of veterinarians again built up an efficient animal health service in the following decades, with veterinary private practice developing from the mid-1950s. The veterinary profession organised itself in 1947 in the form of a veterinary association and, in 1984, legislation was passed to regulate the veterinary profession by the establishment of the Veterinary Council of Namibia. The outbreak of foot and mouth disease in 1961 was instrumental in the creation of an effective veterinary service, meeting international veterinary standards of quality and performance which are still maintained today.

The eradication of rinderpest virus (RPV) from the globe was possible through the availability of a safe and effective live attenuated vaccine and a suitable companion diagnostic test. However, the inability to serologically 'Differentiate between naturally Infected and Vaccinated Animals' (DIVA) meant that both the time taken to complete the eradication programme and the economic burden on countries involved was significantly greater than if a vaccine and companion diagnostic test that fulfilled the DIVA concept had been available. During the RPV eradication campaign serosurveillance for RPV was primarily based on a competitive ELISA using a RPV specific (C1) monoclonal antibody (mAb) directed against the viral haemagglutinin (H) protein but this test was not able to meet DIVA requirements. To provide proof of concept for the generation of novel morbillivirus DIVA vaccines we have identified, by phage display, and mutated residues critical for C1 mAb binding and assessed the functionality of mutants in an in vitro fusion assay. Finally we have incorporated mutated epitopes into a full length clone and rescued recombinant RPV using reverse genetics techniques. Here we describe a novel mechanism of marking morbillivirus vaccines, using RPV as a proof of concept, and discuss the applicability of this method to the development of marked vaccines for peste des petits ruminants virus (PPRV)., (Crown Copyright © 2012. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Eradication can be defined as permanent elimination of the occurrence of a given infectious disease. A joint FAO/OIE announcement of global rinderpest eradication was declared in 2011. The announcement from two international organizations indicates that the rinderpest virus, like the smallpox virus, will remain only in authorized laboratories. After rinderpest eradication, the relevant researchers shifted their focus on next target-peste des petits ruminants, since they mostly share similarities in such characteristics as etiology and pathology. This paper, on the one hand, analyzed objective and subjective factors in global rinderpest eradication, and on the other hand, reviewed the pros and cons of global peste des petits ruminants eradication.

The mononegaviruses include a number of highly contagious and severe disease-causing viruses of both animals and humans. For the control of these viral diseases, development of vaccines, either with classical methods or with recombinant DNA virus vectors, has been attempted over the years. Recently reverse genetics of mononegaviruses has been developed and used to generate infectious viruses possessing genomes derived from cloned cDNA in order to study the consequent effects of viral gene manipulations on phenotype. This technology allows us to develop novel candidate vaccines. In particular, a variety of different attenuation strategies to produce a range of attenuated mononegavirus vaccines have been studied. In addition, because of their ideal nature as live vaccines, recombinant mononegaviruses expressing foreign proteins have also been produced with the aim of developing multivalent vaccines against more than one pathogen. These recombinant mononegaviruses are currently under evaluation as new viral vectors for vaccination. Reverse genetics could have great potential for the preparation of vaccines against many mononegaviruses., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

This paper describes the demise of rinderpest, focussing on the 20th Century and especially the period of the Global Rinderpest Eradication Programme, before proceeding to describe the process of accreditation of rinderpest freedom which is now virtually complete., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

For the past decade, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has been working toward eradicating rinderpest through vaccination and intense surveillance by 2012. Because of the potential severity of a rinderpest epidemic, it is prudent to prepare for an unexpected outbreak in animal populations. There is no immunity to the disease among the livestock or wildlife in the United States (US). If rinderpest were to emerge in the US, the loss in livestock could be devastating. We predict the potential spread of rinderpest using a two-stage model for the spread of a multi-host infectious disease among agricultural animals in the US. The model incorporates large-scale interactions among US counties and the small-scale dynamics of disease spread within a county. The model epidemic was seeded in 16 locations and there was a strong dependence of the overall epidemic size on the starting location. The epidemics were classified according to overall size into small epidemics of 100 to 300 animals (failed epidemics), epidemics infecting 3,000 to 30,000 animals (medium epidemics), and the large epidemics infecting around one million beef cattle. The size of the rinderpest epidemics were directly related to the origin of the disease and whether or not the disease moved into certain key counties in high-livestock-density areas of the US. The epidemic size also depended upon response time and effectiveness of movement controls.