Porca miseria!

January 16, 2022 11:50 AM

You've heard of African Swine Fever in Europe before. Now that first cases have just been reported in Piedmont and Liguria, Italians are waking up to looming trade bans on some of their most prized exports, and lockdowns of large tracts of their beloved forests. Few Italians are aware, however, that Europeans colonizers are to thank for the emergence and spread of this flu/fever/pest/pandemic, or of Italy's direct responsibility (pdf here) in causing the previous animal panzootic in Africa, the devastating, genocidal rinderpest of the 1880-90's, in response to which European hogs were introduced to Africa in the first place...

For frontline news, the monitoring of the ASF outbreak in Italy is the remit of the IZSUM. ASF is not to be confused with classic swine fever; also the ASV genotype found in northern Italy is not the type that's been present in Sardinia for over forty years now, it is the genotype that's travelled from Russia and Eastern Europe, recently reaching Germany and Belgium. (Hat tip to R. Evans' 'Behind the Bastards' episode The Italian Invasions of Ethiopia for highlighting B. F. Dugassa's study of the origin of the rinderpest in Oromia.)

posted by progosk (3 comments total)

If the name "rinderpest" is unfamiliar to you, you might know it better by the name the virus took on sometime after it jumped to humans between two and three thousand years ago: measles.
posted by escabeche at 12:55 PM on January 16, 2022 [8 favorites]

Rinderpest has also been eliminated, an absolutely outstanding achievement of global cooperation and applied science that can hopefully be repeated for ASF.
posted by atrazine at 2:34 PM on January 16, 2022 [8 favorites]

👏 👏 👏 post title gold
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 2:48 PM on January 16, 2022 [3 favorites]