Campaigns to Eradicate and Eliminate Diseases

The World Health Organization and UNICEF campaign against yaws began in 1952, treated an estimated 300 million people in 46 countries with mass penicillin and cut prevalence by around 95 percent, yet the disease was not eliminated because carriers were missed and surveillance lapsed, so a renewed effort with oral azithromycin followed from 2013.

Launched in 1955, this World Health Organization campaign relied on residual DDT spraying against mosquitoes and cleared malaria from Europe, the United States and the Caribbean, but it excluded most of sub-Saharan Africa, and in 1969 the World Health Assembly abandoned global eradication in favor of control.

The intensified campaign of 1967 to 1980 paired mass vaccination with surveillance and containment around each case; the last natural case was recorded in Somalia in 1977 and smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980, the only human infectious disease eliminated worldwide so far.

From 1974 to 2002 this West African programme fought river blindness across eleven countries, first by larviciding blackfly breeding sites and from 1988 by adding ivermectin donated by Merck, and it is credited with preventing an estimated 600,000 cases of blindness.

Begun in 1986 under the Carter Center with the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and UNICEF, this campaign has no vaccine or drug to use and depends on filtering drinking water, larvicide and containing patients, taking annual cases from an estimated 3.5 million to fewer than 20.

Created in 1988 after the World Health Assembly resolved to eradicate polio, the initiative combines vaccination campaigns, surveillance and outbreak response; wild type 2 was certified eradicated in 2015 and type 3 in 2019, while type 1 remains in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Launched in 1992 and headquartered in Guatemala, this program applies mass ivermectin treatment in six countries, and it is notable because Colombia became the first country in the world to eliminate onchocerciasis, announced in 2013, leaving transmission only on the Brazil and Venezuela border by 2015.

The alliance launched by the World Health Organization in 1996 backed the SAFE strategy of surgery, antibiotics, facial cleanliness and environmental improvement; the 2020 goal was not reached globally, though several countries were validated as having eliminated trachoma as a public health problem.

Starting in 2000, this programme relies on yearly mass drug administration of albendazole with ivermectin or diethylcarbamazine, donated by GlaxoSmithKline and Eisai, across 72 historically endemic countries, and it aims at elimination as a public health problem rather than eradication.

Founded in 2001 as the Measles Initiative and renamed in 2012 when rubella was added, this coalition supports national vaccination campaigns in high-burden countries in Africa and South Asia, and it closes the path with a reminder that gains in measles deaths can reverse when coverage falls.