(It is now established that the Rinderpest disease in the cattle and the measles in humans are one and same virus.)
Measles virus diverged from the ancient Rinderpest virus in the 6th century BCE.
Rinderpest is a German word.
In German,
Rinder means cattle and Pest means plague.
It is also known as the small pox of cattle and buffalo.
In 1896, the virus entered the cattle of South Africa via the British Army. It is said to have wiped out 95% cattle there in that single epidemic. It is possible that the British Army in Italy got their military oxen from India. The oxen drafted for the British Army in Italy were traced to an Egyptian businessman from Cairo, who supposedly brought with them infected cattle from India.
It has been lately eradicated by a successful vaccine.
Rinderpest virus (RPV) is a negatively sensed single strand RNA virus. It belongs to the Morbillivirus. Our Measles virus also belongs to the same class.
Today we are pretty sure that Measles Virus is an exclusively human pathogen whose closest relative was the now eradicated Rinderpest morbillivirus ( RPV), a devastating cattle pathogen.
Rinderpest was an exclusive cattle virus for a million years as long as our ancestors were living primarily as a hunter gatherer tribe in Africa. Around the first million BCE, these hunter gatherers of Africa have migrated to the Mesopotamia and settled down into villages by the rivers of Mesopotamia. They have left their nomadic lifestyle and settled into permanent villages as shepherds and cultivators. Remember the story of Cain and Abel of Bible.
This led to close contact of cattle and humans with deadly consequences.
Around 600 BCE this exclusive cattle virus mutated and infected us humans. As a result, one new virus was created. Measles*. This became an exclusive human affliction with the highest secondary attack rate (SAR) in humans. Measles was deadly in our ancestors, till we developed a successful vaccine in 1960s. Successful vaccination campaign all over world has restricted its spread. For example, It was completely eradicated from USA till few religious communities opposed vaccination on religion ground. This has led to sporadic spurt in pockets of highly advanced states like New York with deadly consequences.
Today, molecular clock modelling is used to establish the divergence date of these two morbillivirus. It has been established beyond doubt that the measles virus potentially arose as early as the 6th century BCE. This is the period when the nomadic Homo sapiens built large cities where cattles and humans stayed in close quarters.
Divergence date represents the earliest possible date for the establishment of measles in human populations.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7713999/
India has vaccinated over 348 million children between 2017 and March 2023 through nationwide measles-rubella vaccination campaign. Measles cases dropped by 62% between 2017 and 2021, from 10.4 to 4 cases per million population.
Today it is no longer considered to be as dreadful as once it was thought to be.
SARS COV-2 virus is a bat virus that has jumped into mankind sometimes in the 2019. In the next 3 years, our world witnessed over 659 million confirmed cases and over 6.6 million deaths. Like the Rinderpest of 1896 South Africa, suddenly it found a world full of susceptible hosts and ran amok.
In December 2020, we were able to produce a moderately efficient vaccine against this dreadful virus. This immediately controlled the wildfire spread of the disease. Unfortunately the effect of these vaccine was short lived. Hence from time to time in the subsequent winters, our world encounters rise of the virus again and again. As most of us have partial immunological memory, the disease appears to have lost its dread and has mellowed. Number of Death has come down.
Today, globally, half a million new COVID-19 cases and over 2400 new deaths have been reported in the past 28-day period from 23 October to 19 November 2023. Compare this with the global figure of December 2022. ( 659 million confirmed cases and over 6.6 million deaths).
Epilogue:
Will the SARS COV-2 virus follow the course of a mild measles with annual increases in the winters or will it mutate and suddenly initiate a dreadful apocalypse as predicted in our scriptures ?
Only time will tell.
Dr Ramakanta's Ideas 