Overview

Smallpox is an acute, highly contagious, and often lethal disease caused by a virus that may be airborne but that can also be spread by direct contact or by clothing and bedding contaminated by pus and scabs. In 1979 after two years without a reported case, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the global eradication of smallpox. The World Health Assembly continued to monitor the status of smallpox and in 1980 confirmed that the world was indeed free of the disease. The international campaign to eradicate smallpox, launched by WHO in 1967, is one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century public health medicine and a model of international cooperation. The first steps toward the eradication of smallpox were taken in the eighteenth century, when the possibility of controlling the threat of smallpox through inoculation and vaccination was first seriously considered. By the...