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Friday, July 1, 2011

Animals Today in Livestock Health: Rinderpest!

Posted by Brendan Kiley on Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 1:34 PM

Rinderpest is a morbillivirus that can kill up to 95% of a herd of cattle. It is related to a disease called "canine distemper."

Under a microscope, it looks like a suburb—with some lakes and a park or stadium in the upper right quadrant:

From Wikimedia Commons, Copyright held by Dr. Rajnish Kaushik

Rinderpest was researched as a potential biological weapon for the U.S. military. But this coming Tuesday, the United Nations will hold a ceremony in Rome to declare rinderpest the second-ever disease totally eradicated from the planet. (The first was smallpox.)

Thanks to Slog tipper Kevin.

NYC:

... rinderpest is hardly irrelevant to humans. It has been blamed for speeding the fall of the Roman Empire, aiding the conquests of Genghis Khan and hindering those of Charlemagne, opening the way for the French and Russian Revolutions, and subjugating East Africa to colonization.

Any society dependent on cattle — or relatives like African zebu, Asian water buffaloes or Himalayan yaks — was vulnerable.

Anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard thought a rinderpest epidemic in southern Sudan in the 1930s changed the social structure—including commerce and marriage practices—of the pastoral Nuer people.

According to the OED, the etymology of rinderpest comes from Germany, 1796: rinder- comes from rother, which was a word for horned bovines (oxen, etc.) and pest from the Latin pestis, "deadly contagious disease."

But since rinderpest is supposedly eradicated, this knowledge is double-plus useless to you now.

Comments (12) RSS

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Go humans!

Posted by giffy on July 1, 2011 at 1:52 PM

FOr more useless knowledge see the book chapter by Dobson, Holdo and Holt on the virus. Just google: encyclopedia of biological invasions rinderpest

Posted by jaloba on July 1, 2011 at 1:55 PM

But there have been some recent smallpox cases - so it's technically not eradicated, right? Unless their definition of eradication is different than most people's?

Posted by Patti on July 1, 2011 at 2:13 PM

The main element of the photo is actually a single large mammalian cell, and that cell is stuffed with rinderpest virions--the rodlike, zipper-looking structures. The mature viruses will exit the cell and go on to infect adjacent cells or travel around in the bloodstream. The other large blobby structures (lakes, stadium, etc. are the cell's own organelles--nucleus, vacuoles, etc.) Viruses cause disease by entering cells and co-opting their molecular machinery, forcing the cells to make more virus copies out of the nutrients (amino acids, nucleic acid precursors, etc.) that are present, then bursting out like in Alien to wreak further havoc.

Posted by rob!

on July 1, 2011 at 2:14 PM

Re:4 What I came to say.

Also, Check out this cool lysis micrograph.

Posted by Danger on July 1, 2011 at 2:23 PM

Clarification/correction @4: the zipperlike herringbone is specifically the nucleocapsid, which is made of repeating protein elements surrounding the virus-specific genetic material (in this case, single-stranded RNA).

Morbilliviruses are enveloped viruses--the nucleocapsids pick up more membrane structures with integrated proteins as they leave the infected cell. They're called "pleiomorphic," which means lots of different shapes and sizes, which is why I assumed the picture showed an infected cell rather than a discrete virus.

Here's a diagram of the very similar measles virus:

http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v4…

I know this is TMI, but viruses are amazing--essentially non-living things that travel around the world like a bunch of different keys that have the ability to find the locks they fit, and managing to reproduce by coercion.

Posted by rob!

on July 1, 2011 at 2:46 PM

Also, the guy who developed the vaccine most responsible for progress against the disease, Dr. Walter Plowright, was not mentioned in the NYT article and died early last year. I missed it at the time because I'm not in the virus racket anymore, but Plowright also did a lot of the early studies on a virus that was my primary focus for quite a while.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment…

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424…

/nerd

Posted by rob!

on July 1, 2011 at 2:58 PM

@4: THANK YOU. I was thinking, "that sure looks awfully membrane-encapsulated and eukaryotic to be a virus..."

Posted by venomlash on July 1, 2011 at 3:13 PM

Thanks 4, I thought the same thing... "that's some dog epithelial cell or whatnot packed with half-completed viral coat proteins." You can see how it destroys vulnerable tissues. Distemper is an awful awful disease.

Posted by Sandiai on July 1, 2011 at 4:08 PM

@3 You are dead wrong. There was one case after the eradication and that was due to an accident in a lab that infected and killed one person. That particular accident is well studied and cited why all smallpox stores should be eliminated.

The last natural case was 1977, the accidental infection I mentioned was in 1978. Obvious troll is obvious.

Posted by Packeteer on July 1, 2011 at 8:57 PM

It's not completely useless. It's important to remember that the past was different.

Posted by I have always been... east coaster on July 1, 2011 at 10:35 PM

@10, glad to be wrong, definitely not a troll, not sure why you would call me that. I was remembering hearing something about reported cases in Uganda, but just looked them up and they had initially been suspected to be smallpox, but turned out to be chickenpox.

Also, yes, viruses are amazing! Carl Zimmer's book, Parasite Rex, discusses the kind of mushy border between what we consider viruses and what we consider parasites, and it's very readable.

Posted by Patti on July 2, 2011 at 12:45 PM