Factoid of the day

Rinderpest has been eradicated.

No, not recent news at all (the link is a year old). It is a plague of cattle and of wild animals, and can kill up to 80 percent of cattle it infects.

Another factoid is that it is related to human measles. I always thought of rinderpest was animal smallpox, but it is not.

What brought me this info was looking up the debate about the plague of Athens: DNA suggests typhoid, but others insist it was measles. One argument for Measles is that it wasn't around before 500 AD, but a proto measles might have been the cause, since animals also died in the Athenian plague.

Ditto for the Antonine and Cyprian plagues: Measles or smallpox? The Justinian plague was most probably bubonic plague, however historians still argue if Pestis was behind that epidemic or even if it was the cause of the Black death....

The main problem is that viruses evolve, so even with good descriptions, you can't always tell what killed the folks.

The good news? Disease, not promiscuity, caused the population implosion that allowed the fall of the western part of the Roman Empire. So the next time you read that the US is going to fall like ancient Rome, the answer is no, not unless we have a plague to depopulate society and discourage the rest of them.

The bad news? No one knows when the next rogue disease will evolve and cause a world wide pandemic, and this time it will spread faster, thanks to airplanes.