However, a global effort to combat the disease proved to be successful. Since 1994, when Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) launched their global vaccination and isolation program, the infection has been confined and quite possibly wiped out completely, reports Nature magazine.

The last recorded outbreak of rinderpest was in Kenya in 2001, and the last remaining pockets were in several areas of sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. Now the health bodies say that in 18 months they will be ready to declare rinderpest officially eradicated. It would be only the second case of an infection being successfully vanquished by humankind. The first was smallpox, which was declared no longer existent in 1980.