Smallpox was the worst disease in history. It killed more people than all the wars in history.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it's just such a dramatic success.
Smallpox, which spreads by respiration and kills roughly one in three of those infected, took hundreds of millions of lives during a recorded history dating to Pharaonic Egypt. The last case was in 1978, and the disease was declared eradicated on May 8, 1980.
Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.
In 1967, the world health community launched a global effort to eradicate smallpox. It took a coordinated, worldwide effort, required the commitment of every government, and cost $130 million dollars. By 1977, smallpox had disappeared.
The world has been very careful to pick very few diseases for eradication, because it is very tough.
Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World's Indian population.
You don't have to vaccinate every man, woman and child in the country if you have a couple of cases of smallpox cropping up.
It's not anthrax or terrorism or AIDS that is the worst ill in our world: The most horrible disease in the world is hate.
It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans, in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.
The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster.