In only the second elimination of a disease, rinderpest — a virus that used to kill cattle by the millions, leading to famine and death among humans — has been declared wiped off the face of the Earth.
Rinderpest, which means “cattle plague” in German, does not infect humans, although it belongs to the same viral 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 percent — higher even than smallpox, the only other disease ever eliminated.
On Thursday, the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization announced that it was dropping its field surveillance efforts because it was convinced that the disease was gone. The last case was seen in Kenya in 2001.
