Cattle Plagues Past and Present: The Mystery of Mad Cow Disease

Abstract

Bubonic plague has erupted on a global scale a number of times in the past two millennia, in Europe most dramatically in the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Its impact then was profound for two predominant reasons. It killed between a third and a half of the population and its origins and dissemination were mysteries which persisted for centuries.' The impact of bubonic plague was so great as to lead to a second, popular definition of plague 'an affliction, calamity, evil, a scourge'. In other words, a plague is a highly dramatic disaster which combines widespread devastation with mystery as to its origins and spread. This conception of plague remains potent. Folk memories of the great influenza pandemic immediately following the first world war invest it with the title of plague (in Australia at least). More recently, Aids has reawakened acute anxieties previously stilled by the progress of modern medicine, and has achieved plague status.2 Epizootics can also be plagues. The term 'rinderpest', German for 'cattle plague', testifies to its devastating impact; the panzootics of rinderpest which swept Europe in the eighteenth century are estimated to have killed 200 million head of cattle. Rinderpest also destroyed millions in southern Africa at the end of the last century, devastating societies in which cattle were the major form of wealth.3 As for its incursion into Great Britain between 1865 and 1867, this was the most dramatic episode in nineteenth-century British agricultural history.4 No other single event has had the same impact on public consciousness until the present epizootic of Mad Cow Disease, of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). After 130 years, a livestock disease has again become the prime focus of public concern in Britain.