PARIS, France (Reuters) — Too many laboratories still have samples of the devastating cattle disease rinderpest, two years after it was eradicated, says the World Organization for Animal Health.
Rinderpest is only the second disease after smallpox to be wiped out.
Member countries of the organization, known as the OIE, committed to destroy their samples or pass them onto a handful of approved high-security laboratories when the world was declared free of rinderpest in 2011.
However, 25 laboratories still have samples, said OIE director general Bernard Vallat, although he wouldn’t say where.
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Rinderpest, or cattle plague, did not affect humans directly but decimated hundreds of millions of cattle across Asia, Europe and Africa.
As with smallpox, the aim was to leave only a few samples in high-security laboratories for research or for vaccination in case the disease re-emerged.
“If you release these materials into the wild, they can touch sensitive species and re-trigger a global animal disease even more so that there are no animals vaccinated anymore,” Vallat said.
“It would be a disaster if it happened.”
Scientists argue they need samples for research and would be vulnerable to bioterrorist attack without them to produce vaccines.
However, Vallat said leaving too many samples in possibly insecure locations is an unacceptable risk.
“We have no blue helmet,” he said, referring to the headgear worn by United Nations peacekeepers.
“I cannot guarantee that some countries that have the virus did not declare it. Some countries may refuse to be transparent due to political ulterior motives,” he said.
OIE owes its existence to rinderpest. An outbreak of the disease in imported animals in Belgium in 1920 was the impetus for international co-operation in controlling animal diseases and the creation of OIE in 1924.
The disease, eradicated with support from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, is believed to have been brought to Europe by Moghul invaders in the 13th century.
Many species of wild and domestic cloven-hoofed animals, including sheep and goats, showed symptoms of the disease only when infected, but mortality reached up to 100 percent in cattle and buffalo herds.
The Americas and Oceania never faced rinderpest epidemics.
As in the case of rinderpest, it was a global campaign that led to the eradication of smallpox, a highly contagious human disease that killed Queen Mary II of England and Louis XV of France and threatened 60 percent of the world’s population until a vaccine was found in the 1950s.
Only two high-security laboratories still have samples of smallpox after it was eradicated in late 1979: the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and Russia’s State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo, Novosibirsk.
A joint advisory committee between the OIE and the FAO on rinderpest advised late last year that strategic rinderpest vaccine stores be maintained in selected locations should the disease reoccur.
