‘It was the pyres,’ said my husband. He meant the effect of television pictures of cattle, hooves silhouetted against the sky, burnt during the foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001. It was eradicated by culling six million beasts, not by vaccination producing herd immunity.
In Shropshire, stone memorials survive to the outbreak of rinderpest (like Covid-19 a viral disease) of 1865-67. One outbreak ‘swept 54 head off this farm’ near Market Drayton. ‘They died without remedy and here lie. “Shall we receive good from God and not evil?” Job 2:10.’ Nationally, 289,581 died.
Britain had met the three big 18th-century cattle plagues by paying farmers to slaughter sick animals quickly, a policy pursued from 1714 by Dr Thomas Bates. This murrain, later called rinderpest, recurred. In south and east Africa it killed 80 per cent of cattle in the 1890s. Only systematic vaccination saw it off.
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