Lifesavers · No. 02
Smallpox eradication
Smallpox killed about 300 million people in the 20th century alone, and in 1980 became the first human disease ever deliberately wiped from the Earth.
Updated
The figure is the disease's toll in one century; eradication means that toll is now zero.
How it saves lives
There is no cure for smallpox, so the campaign worked by finding every outbreak and vaccinating a ring of people around it until the virus had nowhere left to go. Because humans were the only host, cutting off transmission everywhere meant the virus simply ran out of people and vanished.
The story
For at least three thousand years smallpox was one of humanity's great killers, scarring and blinding those it did not kill. In the 20th century alone it took hundreds of millions of lives. A global effort of thousands of health workers, chasing the last cases across deserts and villages, ended it. On 8 May 1980 the World Health Assembly declared the world free of smallpox, the only human disease ever eradicated.
From the record
killing 300 million people in the 20th century alone
From the record
The world and all its peoples have won freedom from smallpox.
Asked often
How many people did smallpox kill?
The WHO states smallpox killed about 300 million people in the 20th century alone, and it had plagued humanity for at least 3,000 years before that.
When was smallpox eradicated?
The 33rd World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated on 8 May 1980. It remains the only human disease ever eradicated.
Further reading
Read the whole story
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Firsthand account
Smallpox (opens Bookshop.org)
Donald A. Henderson · 2009
Donald Henderson ran the WHO campaign that ended smallpox, and this is his own account of the vaccinators, the surveillance strategy and the last natural case in Somalia in 1977.
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The history
The Speckled Monster (opens Bookshop.org)
Jennifer Lee Carrell · 2003
Carrell tells how Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in London and Zabdiel Boylston in Boston brought inoculation against smallpox to the West in the early 1700s, decades before Jenner.
The next one is being invented now.
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