WHEN the world celebrated the eradication of smallpox in 1979, it was widely assumed that other infectious diseases would soon follow it into the history books. Yet a quarter of a century later, despite heroic efforts to eliminate polio, leprosy and numerous other diseases, smallpox remains the only one we have conquered.
So it should be a cause for celebration that another infectious disease is at last on the brink of eradication (see “Killer in the fold”). It’s not a human disease, but that hardly matters, as the cattle plague rinderpest has arguably caused people more misery, poverty and death than most human diseases, especially…
