Smallpox Eradication Programme

A World Health Organization campaign, intensified from 1967, that ran through 1980 to eliminate smallpox worldwide. When the intensified effort began in 1967 more than 10 million cases had been recorded across 43 countries. The campaign combined mass vaccination aimed at roughly 80 percent coverage in endemic areas with a surveillance and containment strategy that tracked outbreaks and vaccinated contacts around each case, drawing on staff from 73 nations and around 150,000 national workers over 12 years. The last naturally occurring case was recorded in Somalia in 1977, and in 1980 the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated, the only human infectious disease eliminated worldwide to date, at a World Health Organization cost of roughly 112 million dollars.