7.4.1: Smallpox and Polio
Smallpox was a devastating disease that used to kill 3/10 people it infected. Historians think it is at least 3000 years old, as some smallpox pustules have been found on ancient Egyptian mummies. Due to global travel and trade which happened between the 6th and 18th centuries, it spread around the world.
It was Edward Jenner’s experiments with using cowpox to vaccinate against smallpox that began the idea of vaccination against disease and opened the door to the possibility of eradicating smallpox entirely. Even after better vaccines were developed, it still took nearly 2 centuries to get rid of smallpox around the world. The last known case of smallpox was in 1977, after the World Health Organization had begun the Intensified Eradication Program (1967). Although smallpox had already been eliminated in Northern Europe and North America in the decades prior, it took additional funding, personnel, and focused surveillance and vaccination efforts to reach eradication. Finally, in 1980, smallpox was declared officially eradicated. In order to decrease the risk of a potential laboratory accident, there are only two labs in the world approved to continue research on the variola virus - one at the CDC in Atlanta Georgia, and the other at the VECTOR Institute in Koltsovo, Russia ( History of Smallpox , 2021).
Polio has seen a similar worldwide vaccination effort, particularly with the oral version of the vaccine which makes it easier to distribute without the need for healthcare providers to administer it. Two of the three wild polioviruses that cause the poliomyelitis disease have been eradicated, and one is still endemic in just two countries: Afghanistan and Pakistan (Roser et al., 2024). The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) launched in 1988, and since then has decreased polio cases from 350,000 to just under 10 annually (CDC, 2023c).