Paul-Félix Armand-Delille (3 July 1874 – 4 September 1963) was a French physician, bacteriologist, professor, and member of the French Academy of Medicine. He is best known for attempting to protect his crop from rabbits by releasing a pair of rabbits infected with Myxoma virus on to his farm in northern France.[1] The spread of the vira lead to a plague of myxomatosis that caused the collapse of rabbit populations throughout much of Europe and beyond in the 1950s.[2]
Within a year of the initial release, an estimated 45% of the wild rabbits in France had died of the disease, along with 35% of domestic rabbits, and the disease subsequently spread to the rest of western Europe, destroying rabbit populations in the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Germany, Britain, and beyond.[8]
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