28 Jun Shot in the Dark
Charles Kenny, Foreign Policy
In 2009, veterinarians at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization made a remarkable announcement: Rinderpest, a livestock-borne disease, would soon be eradicated. OK, so maybe it wasn’t front-page news, but rinderpest — which causes animals to develop fever, followed by diarrhea and (frequently) death — has over thousands of years been a recurring plague on human civilization. It has destroyed the food supplies of entire countries such as Ethiopia, which lost a third of its population to a rinderpest-related famine in the late 19th century. The FAO’s eradication effort, launched in 1992, marks only the second time a disease has been deliberately wiped off the face of the Eearth; the first, better-known case was smallpox, which killed between 300 million and 500 million people over the course of the 20th century before its eradication in 1980.