A WHO commission certified smallpox eradicated
On this day · 9 December 1979
In Geneva in 1979, nineteen scientists signed off on humanity's first deliberate extinction of a disease.
On December 9, 1979, the Global Commission for the Certification of Smallpox Eradication, an independent panel of 19 scientists drawn from around the world, signed a parchment at WHO headquarters in Geneva certifying that smallpox had been wiped from the planet. It remains the first disease ever eradicated by deliberate human effort.
Smallpox had killed for millennia, scarring and blinding survivors and ending an estimated hundreds of millions of lives in the 20th century alone. A WHO-led global vaccination and surveillance campaign chased it into its last strongholds.
The final naturally occurring case struck Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Somalia, in 1977. After two years of intensive searching turned up no more cases, the commission was satisfied.
The certification was formally endorsed by the World Health Assembly in May 1980.
No other human disease has yet been declared eradicated.
Sources & references
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