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Donald "D.A." Henderson, a physician, educator, and epidemiologist who led the World Health Organization's campaign to eradicate smallpox, died at 87 years of age on Aug. 19, 2016.
Smallpox was responsible for an estimated 300–500 million deaths during the 20th century. As recently as 1967, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 15 million people contracted the disease and that two million died in that year.
After vaccination campaigns throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the WHO certified the global eradication of smallpox in 1979. Smallpox is one of two infectious diseases to have been eradicated, the other being rinderpest, which was declared eradicated in 2011.
Key to the eradication effort, given an insufficient supply of vaccine to inoculate everyone, was "surveillance-containment":
This technique entailed rapid reporting of cases from all health units and prompt vaccination of household members and close contacts of confirmed cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Henderson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox
2014 Interview: http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-special-henderson/ or use YouTube.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday August 26 2016, @09:24PM
Some Americans, I'm sure, are also aware of the CIA program(s). Some may even be aware of the Tuskegee experiment [wikipedia.org], the Guatemala syphilis experiment [wikipedia.org] or even other programmes [wikipedia.org] in which people were given injections of dioxin, plutonium, etc.:
From the 1950s to 1972, mentally disabled children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis, for research whose purpose was to help discover a vaccine. From 1963 to 1966, Saul Krugman of New York University promised the parents of mentally disabled children that their children would be enrolled into Willowbrook in exchange for signing a consent form for procedures that he claimed were "vaccinations." In reality, the procedures involved deliberately infecting children with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of patients infected with the disease.
Some anti-vaxxers keep going on about the contamination [nih.gov] of polio vaccines with SV40 [wikipedia.org] (short for "simian virus 40"), an honest mistake that was corrected all the way back in 1978!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday August 29 2016, @01:55PM
Anti-vaxxers are not looking for a rational reason. They are looking for a rationalization. An excuse. Any excuse will do. A decades old mistake is good enough. If not that, then something fictional, made up, will do just as well.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Monday August 29 2016, @03:06PM
Of course. That's why I made those things up.