Smallpox

The last person to catch smallpox in the wild was Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Merca, Somalia, in October 1977. He recovered. In May 1980 the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated, making it the only human disease wiped out so far.

A 1978 laboratory accident in England caused the last known smallpox death. Samples are still kept in two high-security labs.

Context

The global eradication campaign used surveillance and containment: health workers found cases and vaccinated the people around them, which is called ring vaccination. The intensified WHO program began in 1967, and the last case of the more deadly variola major occurred in Bangladesh in 1975.

Ali Maow Maalin caught the milder variola minor form in Somalia in 1977. After a period of watching for any new cases, a commission certified the world free of smallpox in late 1979, and the World Health Assembly made its declaration on 8 May 1980.

The 1978 laboratory case in Birmingham, England, in which a medical photographer named Janet Parker died, was the last known death from the disease. Stocks of the virus are officially kept at two WHO-approved repositories, in the United States and Russia, and debates continue over whether they should be destroyed. Smallpox is estimated to have killed hundreds of millions of people in the twentieth century alone, which is why the eradication is regarded as a landmark of public health.