| Title | Director of Smallpox Eradication Campaign Dies | |
| Date | Friday August 26 2016, @01:08PM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the Out,-damned-spot! dept. | ||
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.
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printed from SoylentNews, Director of Smallpox Eradication Campaign Dies on 2025-12-07 00:51:00