As scientists scramble for a COVID-19 cure and vaccine, the world marked on Friday a pertinent anniversary: humanity’s only true triumph over an infectious disease with its eradication of smallpox four decades ago.
On May 8, 1980, representatives of all World Health Organization member-states gathered in Geneva and officially declared that the smallpox-causing variola virus had been relegated to the history books, two centuries after the discovery of a vaccine.
Smallpox is a highly contagious disease that was transmitted via droplets during close contact with other people or contaminated objects, sparking high fever and a rash that left survivors permanently disfigured and often blind.
But many did not survive. The virus killed up to 30 percent of all those infected and is estimated to have killed more than 300 million people in the 20th century alone.
Smallpox is thought to have existed for thousands of years, with the earliest documented evidence of the vesicular skin lesions believed to be caused by the disease discovered on the mummy of Egyptian pharaoh Ramses V.
The devastating disease was also the target of the world’s first vaccine, discovered by scientist and physician Edward Jenner in 1796.
‘Public will’
But the idea of fully eradicating smallpox only emerged nearly two centuries later, in 1958, amid a “momentary ‘detente’ between the Russians and Americans,” US epidemiologist Larry Brilliant told AFP.
At a time when smallpox remained endemic in more than 30 countries and was still killing more than two million people annually, the Soviets proposed to show what global cooperation is good for and eradicate the disease.
They made the proposal during a meeting of the WHO’s annual assembly.
“Immediately America agreed,” Brilliant said, juxtaposing the leadership and international cooperation seen back then, during the Cold War, to the “nationalism” coloring the current response to the novel coronavirus.
“There was public will,” he said.
Four decades later, as the world reels from the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, decision-makers should look to the tireless efforts to isolate those infected with smallpox and trace their contacts for inspiration, said Rosamund Lewis, in charge of the smallpox file at the WHO.
“We can learn a lot from smallpox for the COVID response,” she said.