A Global Success Story: Deadly Cattle Disease Is Wiped Off the Planet

Goodbye and good riddance, rinderpest.

For only the second time in history, humans have eradicated a disease through a long, slogging campaign of vaccinations and global alertness.
Rinderpest, which means “cattle plague” in German, does not affect humans, though it belongs to the same virus family as measles. But for millenniums in Asia, Europe and Africa it wiped out cattle, water buffalo, yaks and other animals needed for meat, milk, plowing and cart-pulling. Its mortality rate is about 80 pe