Rinderpest

“ The most serious is the destruction by the rinderpest of more than 75 per cent of the draught cattle, because it will take several years of breeding to restore the necessary number of these indispensable aids to agriculture. The commission attempted to supply by purchase from adjoining countries the needed cattle, but the experiments made were unsuccessful. Most of the cattle imported were unable to withstand the change of climate and the rigors of the voyage and died from other diseases than rinderpest. ”

“ The range of the eland once extended from Cape Agulhas to the White Nile, but it has become extinct in many districts of Southern Africa, and in almost every other portion of its range has, like all other tragelaphine antelopes, suffered so cruelly from the recent visitation of rinderpest that it has now become a scarce animal all over Africa. ”

“ Susceptibility has a powerful influence even in races habitually subject to rinderpest. The highest susceptibility inheres in cattle, and yet the surviving cattle of the Steppe race, which has been exposed to the infection for centuries, mostly recover from the plague, while fresh cattle imported into the Steppes perish almost without exception. Sheep and goats contract the disease but it is more severe and deadly in the latter than in the former animal. ”

“ The destruction of wild animals in South Africa which, by removing the sources of nagana, rendered the settlement of the country possible was due chiefly to the introduction of another infectious disease, rinderpest, which not only destroyed the wild animals but produced great destruction of the domestic cattle as well. ”

“ In summoning the brilliant Director of the German Imperial Board of Health to South Africa to investigate the nature of rinderpest, and, if possible, discover a means of protecting cattle from its onslaught, the Cape Government afforded another opportunity for the scientific study of a disease associated with animals, upon the successful mastery and limitation of which the agricultural prosperity of South Africa is so largely dependent, being as it is one of the most fatal and contagious maladies to which cattle are subject. ”

“ The fields were devastated by war, and before labor could restore what the soldiers had destroyed, rinderpest attacked the carabaos and [153] in some places carried away as many as 90 per cent of the animals. We visited a sugar plantation which had lost more than half of its carabaos during the two weeks preceding. Everywhere one sees fields overgrown with grass which cannot be cultivated for lack of plow animals. One can understand something of the rinderpest calamity when it is remembered that these patient beasts do all the plowing and all of the hauling in the Philippine Islands. ”

“ For example, if cattle are inoculated on one side of the body with virulent blood from animals dying of rinderpest, and on the other side with blood serum taken from animals that have recovered from the disease and subsequently have had their immunity intensified by injections of highly virulent blood, the cattle so vaccinated will develop rinderpest in a mild form and will subsequently on recovery be also immune ”

“ In Cape Colony alone, so far back as 1899, about half a million cattle had received preventive treatment against rinderpest; and the sum total of human and animal lives saved or safeguarded, in all parts of the world, must be reckoned in millions by this time. ”

“ In that much-dreaded South African cattle disease, rinderpest, the infection, contrary to what is found in the case of tuberculous animals, is principally spread by the materies morbi being liberated in the air expired by afflicted cattle, the contagious area surrounding an infected animal extending to as much as a hundred yards and more. ”

“ Like the light flashed from a child’s mirror on a darkened wall, so they flickered and swept forwards and backwards from end to end of the Old World—from the Malay Peninsula to the North Cape of Norway, from Kamschatka to the south point of Africa. A parallel may be found in the recent epidemic of rinderpest amongst the herbivorous animals of Africa. Years might pass, old men might remember, the peoples might sacrifice to their gods ”

“ There was, he said, no doubt that the disease was the dreaded rinderpest. He drew a cordon around the valley in which Noquala’s kraal was situated, and put a chain of guards to see that no animal left the infected area.
Noquala and ’Ndakana had a long and serious conversation, the result of which was that the former’s fears were somewhat stilled. What did the Magistrate know of cattle? asked the “gqira.” The beasts were all right. Those from the Drakensberg had apparently eaten of some poisonous herb on the way down. A few might die, but the others would recover. ”

“ Indeed, the ablest medical men who have written against the adoption of a quarantine system for human small-pox and cholera, such as Professor Siegmund, of Berlin, acknowledge its value and absolute requirement with regard to the Rinderpest. ”

“ Similar deposits have been found upon the mucous membrane of the fourth stomach and intestine, which is always inflamed. There is more or less inflammation of the membranes of the brain, kidneys, and liver, and some fatty degeneration of the voluntary muscles. In countries where rinderpest occasionally appears it may be difficult to distinguish between it and malignant catarrh, owing to a general similarity of the symptoms. ”

“ Nearly all the diseases of cattle for which a definite cause has been traced are from bacteria. Among these are tuberculosis, anthrax, blackleg, and tetanus (or lockjaw) . Some diseases, such as Texas fever and nagana, are traceable to protozoa, while others, like vactinomycosis and aspergillosis, are caused by fungi. Those diseases of which the cause is unknown or imperfectly worked out are pleuropneumonia, rinderpest, foot-and-mouth disease, rabies, cowpox, malignant catarrh, and dysentery. ”

“ Dr Crisp ate part of the cooked flesh of an animal that had died of cattle plague, and I myself partook of moderately cooked meat which I knew to be swarming with psorosperms. These obscure organisms were by some persons considered to be either a cause or product of the rinderpest. They will be noticed in my account of the Protozoal parasites.
For the purpose of advancing science and the welfare of the people, there are scores of persons always to be found ready to make personal sacrifices of the kind undertaken by Drs Ragni, Martini, and Gemelli. ”

“ In a latitude of 30° south, where frost is rare, and with a dry climate (12 to 30 inches of rain per annum) , the colonists find no occasion for housing their cattle, so that the conditions for the prevention of tuberculosis are ideal. It may be added that cattle are far less numerous in Cape Colony than they formerly were. The destruction first by lung plague and later by rinderpest has made the cattle industry extremely 473hazardous, and even before the advent of the rinderpest many had abandoned cattle and taken to sheep. ”

“ Among the Kharwârs, when rinderpest attacks the cattle, they take a black cock, put some red lead on its head, some antimony on its eyes, a spangle on its forehead, and fixing a pewter bangle to its leg, let it loose, calling to the disease—“Mount on the fowl and go elsewhere into the ravines and thickets; destroy the sin!” This dressing up of the scape animal in a woman’s ornaments and trinkets is almost certainly a relic of some grosser form of expiation in which a human being was sacrificed. ”

“ Seek to ensure effective prevention and progressive control of plant and animal pests and diseases, including especially those which are of transboundary nature, such as rinderpest, cattle tick, foot and mouth disease and desert locust, where outbreaks can cause major food shortages, destabilize markets and trigger trade measures; and promote concurrently, regional collaboration in plant pests and animal disease control and the widespread development and use of integrated pest management practices. ”

“ Professor Gamgee says that one fifth of the meat eaten in the metropolis is diseased. In 1863 the bodies of an enormous number of animals suffering from rinderpest, as well as from pleuro-pneumonia, were consumed in London; and we know that thousands of sheep die every year, in the country, of rot ”

“ While the people were dying of cholera the carabaos, the only draught and farm animals in the Islands, were dying by thousands of an epidemic of rinderpest. This scourge, too, was fought with all the force of both the civil and military arms of the government, but before it could be checked it had carried off a large majority of the carabaos in the Archipelago with the result that agriculture and all other industries dependent upon this mode of transportation were paralysed. ”

“ The period during which a man may infect the mosquito, should it bite him, is far shorter, and extends only over the first three days of the illness.
Very careful search has hitherto failed to reveal the{164} presence of the parasite of yellow fever. By its works alone can it be judged. It seems that, like the germ of rinderpest and of foot-and-mouth disease, it is ultra-microscopic, and our highest lenses fail to resolve it. From the course of the disease and the nature of its host, it will probably prove to be something like the organism which causes malaria. ”

“ Firearms, and lately rinderpest, have greatly reduced the number of these creatures. They live and feed in herds, and, like the Indian species, are fond of the neighbourhood of water, in which they bathe, but are not so dependent on bathing and wallowing as the former. ”

“ The blood of immune cattle in Texas fever regions, we know, contains, in small numbers, the babesia. Edington's experiments show that the supervention of a second infection, rinderpest, determines the multiplication of the latent babesia, and the explosion of the characteristic symptoms. May this not be in strict analogy with what happens in blackwater fever? The infection of blackwater fever may remain latent for considerable periods, until provoked into activity by some special agency, as cold, shock, quinine, or some additional infection, especially malaria. ”

“ Eruptions all over the body, an occasional symptom of rinderpest, are called by the natives kinka. Cattle are said to be not infrequently poisoned by Mádigas, who then eat their flesh and take their hides.
Generally speaking, the cattle are bought by merchants and ryots at the large weekly fairs at Tummapála (in Vizagapatam district) , Pithápuram, Drákshárámam (in Rámachandrapuram) , Ambájipéta (in Amalápuram) and PalokoUu in the Kistna district. Merchants go the round of these markets with their herds until they are all sold. The Pithápuram and Drákshárámam cattle fairs are famous. ”

“ No difficulties with the natives were apprehended, and farms and town-sites were at a high value. No one, in fact, dreamed that in a few months the whole country would be overwhelmed in the calamity of the rinderpest—a cattle disease that swept from Abyssinia to the Cape and killed in its course nearly the whole stock of cattle, as well as many fine species of game, such as buffalo, eland, koodoo, etc. Added to this the Matabele again rose, burnt the farms, and in many cases murdered all the new settlers and carried destruction throughout the whole country north of the Limpopo. ”

“ Our data also have implications for transmission. We have shown that R. felis (transitional group) ,R. canadensis (canadensis group) and R. bellii (bellii group) are more closely related to Rickettsiain non-blood feeding hosts than to those found in other blood feeding hosts. Therefore, are these strains even transmitted horizontally? As far as we are aware, even in cases where the bacteria can infect vertebrates (as is the case with R. felis) , there has been no recorded instance of transmission back to arthropods (i.e. ectoparasites can not pick up the infection from vertebrates) . ”

“ Similarly, species of spiders and other forms which are ordinarily perfectly harmless, may accidentally convey and inoculate pyogenic bacteria.
It is as essential hosts of disease germs that arthropods play their most important rôle. In such cases an essential part of the life cycle of the pathogenic organism is undergone in the insect. In other words, without the arthropod host the disease-producing organism cannot complete its development. As illustrations may be cited the relation of the Anopheles mosquito to the malarial parasite, and the relation of the cattle tick to Texas fever. ”

“ Apparently the Trypanosoma can live in the blood without doing much harm, and only when it reaches the cerebro-spinal canal does it set up the sleeping-sickness. It is also found in great numbers in the lymphatic glands, especially those of the neck, which in patients infected by the parasite are usually swollen and tender. From the similarity of the parasite to that causing the cattle disease of South Africa, the idea at once arose that the Trypanosoma was conveyed from man to man by a biting insect. ”

“ That Diptera of the type of the common house-fly are often in large measure responsible for the spread of such diseases as cholera and enteric fever is undeniable, and as regards blood-sucking forms, in addition to those to which reference has already been made, it is sufficient to mention the vast army of pests constituted by the midges, sand-flies, horse-flies, &c., from the attacks of which domestic animals suffer equally with man, in addition to being frequently infested with the larvae of the bot and warble flies (Gastrophilus, Oestrus and Hypoderma) . ”