The Rinderpest Campaigns: A Virus, Its Vaccines, and Global Development in the Twentieth Century by Amanda Kay McVety (review)

Rinderpest virus (RPV) was perhaps the most devastating bovine disease in Eurasian and African history before it was eradicated in 2011. Amanda Kay McVety’s The Rinderpest Campaigns examines the long-term history of RPV eradication, arguing that ultimate success, after many failed starts, was delayed by colonial and nationalist obstructions associated with the Cold War. In the process, international agencies, primarily the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), engaged with local actors and community experts to perfect a blueprint for disease eradication. Owing to Rinderpest’s global importance, The Rinderpest Campaigns crosses borders frequently, encompassing case studies as varied as American-occupied Philippines, Japanese-colonized Manchuria, colonial Africa, southeast Asia, and modern China. McVety overviews the evolution of germ theory and the modern history of vaccination, positing RPV as a historical actor.

Although her focus is World War II to the present, McVety starts with the eighteenth century, when Western Europeans recognized “cattle plague” as a distinct disease that they fought using quarantines, cattle culling, market controls, and border surveillance. These methods successfully mastered the virus following nineteenth-century European epizootics that usually accompanied warfare. European veterinarians came to understand that international coordination was necessary to stanch animal diseases, motivating the first European Rinderpest treaty in 1872. As the European powers conquered Africa, Italy inadvertently introduced Rinderpest south of the Sahara for the first time, spreading the virus from Eritrea to South Africa in the 1890s, virtually wiping out African cattle herds. At a time when germ theory was in its infancy, international researchers mobilized to protect the herds of southern Africa, making the first vaccine breakthroughs, which provided a new, albeit imperfect weapon to fight the virus. Different strains of the virus required different vaccines, with researchers in Egypt, Kenya, Korea, India, and Manila making important contributions. An unexpected RPV epizootic in Belgium following World War I, coupled with new outbreaks in the Soviet borderlands and a brief eruption in Brazil—the only ever in the Americas—warned Europeans that the Rinderpest threat continued, leading to the founding of the OIE (Office International des Epizooties) in 1924, which coordinated research into livestock diseases.

Despite North America never suffering a Rinderpest outbreak, during World War II the possibility that enemy combatants would attack the world’s largest cattle economy led American and Canadian scientists, coordinated by their respective war departments, to research defenses against RPV on the island of Grosse Île in the Saint Lawrence River. This meant bringing a live virus to the western hemisphere, with potentially unpredictable consequences. McVety shows that Japanese researchers developed a successful powdered RPV that could be disseminated by balloon bomb. At war’s end, vaccines developed at Grosse Île—particularly an avianized vaccine—offered a weapon against global poverty, just in time for the Cold War. It was a time when international agencies, especially the FAO and OIE, sought an ascendant role in world affairs, despite resistance from the imperial powers, who guarded veterinary science within their empires to justify continued colonial rule. Vaccines developed at Grosse Île offered potential biological weapons or defenses that the United States could use during the Cold War.

The Rinderpest Campaigns effectively overviews the complexities of developing ever-better vaccines, eventually leading to Plowright’s Tissue Culture Rinderpest Vaccine (TCRV), developed in Kenya. TCRV’s main weakness was the need for refrigeration in tropical conditions, a problem mastered by the late 1980s. By then, the World Health Organization, with USAID funding, had eliminated small-pox globally, which offered a model for Rinderpest eradication. With the cheap, effective Plowright vaccine, the FAO and OIE, with support from the European Community and the African Union, launched the Global Rinderpest Eradication Program to eliminate the last remaining foci of the virus. McVety emphasizes that the campaign, despite many setbacks—including...