The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced that “an ambitious global effort that has brought rinderpest, a deadly cattle plague, to the brink of extinction, is ending all field activities, paving the way for official eradication of the disease.” FOA made the announcement at a Global Rinderpest Eradication Symposium held in Rome, 13-14 October 2010. The eradication, achieved through mass immunization with vaccines, “…would be the first time in history that humankind has succeeded in wiping out an animal disease in the wild, and only the second time, after smallpox in 1980, that a disease has been eliminated thanks to human efforts.” Rinderpest does not affect humans directly, but its ability to cause swift, massive losses of cattle and other hoofed animals has led to devastating effects on agriculture for millennia, leaving famine and economic devastation in its wake, FOA said. A joint FAO/OIE announcement of global rinderpest eradication is expected in mid-2011, pending a review of final official disease status reports from a handful of countries to the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE).