Smallpox: The Death of a Disease. The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer

Abstract

In late October 1977, Ali Maow Maalin was admitted to hospital in Merca, a port town in southern Somalia, where he would unhappily come to occupy a place in history as the last known case of smallpox. While Maalin, unlike most victims of this dreadful disease, survived, his infection could only have occurred through transmission from another human being, and thus he represents a remarkable bookend to a long and deadly history of the pox's person-to-person transmission. From 1967 to 1977, D. A. Henderson headed-up the World Health Organization's Smallpox Eradication Unit, an organization that was ultimately responsible for the disappearance of the disease. In this highly enjoyable memoir, Henderson recalls the context, events, and decisions of that successful decade, which ultimately ended with Maalin's case. Of a middling Calvinist and Republican background, Henderson studied at Oberlin College and then the University of Rochester School of Medicine, and subsequently came serendipitously to a small post at the Epidemic Intelligence Service, a branch of the recently established Center for Disease Control. From that early CDC appointment, Henderson would go on to become an aspiring public health professional, a role that would eventually lead him to expatriate with his family to Geneva, Switzerland, as Unit Chief of the Eradication Unit, a small three-room headquarters with the seemingly Herculean target of zero reported cases of smallpox globally. Henderson's memoir consequently traces the story of the eradication of the disease, country-by-country—from Brazil and Indonesia, much of Africa and South Asia, and finally to Ethiopia and Somalia. In his conclusion, Henderson contemplates the threat of smallpox as an agent of biological warfare.