By Angela Nelson
Permanently wiping out a disease is tricky business. Polio, measles, mumps—all have effective vaccines, yet they persist in certain pockets around the world. To date, the World Health Organization considers just two viruses as successfully eradicated: smallpox and rinderpest.
It may not be a household name, but rinderpest was once a deadly scourge that infected cattle for millennia, killing millions of animals. The United Nations announced its eradication in 2011, after the last outbreak had been reported about a decade earlier.
Jeffrey Mariner, D.V.M., V87, then a veterinary epidemiologist at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, and his colleagues were instrumental in the quest to permanently end the disease.
“For Dr. Mariner and his colleagues at Cummings School and around the world, the collaborative efforts required to eliminate rinderpest, like smallpox, were a truly tremendous achievement in uniting innovative social approaches with extensive community level efforts and technological advances,” said Jonathan Runstadler, D.V.M., Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Infectious Disease and Global Health at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine.
Today, 15 years after the official eradication announcement, Mariner says the successful effort to rid the world of rinderpest offers enduring insights.
Despite retiring from Tufts, Mariner continues his work, now mostly focused on combating goat plague, or peste des petits ruminants (PPR). Like rinderpest, the disease is highly contagious and can infect an entire herd. Passing on knowledge learned from direct experience—like the importance of grassroots disease monitoring and strategic vaccination, both of which helped eradicate rinderpest—remains an important element of keeping current and future diseases in check, he says.
Source : tufts.edu