Smallpox: The Only Disease Humanity Has Erased

Smallpox killed roughly 300 million people in the twentieth century alone. Then thousands of health workers spent a decade tracking every outbreak to the last case — a hospital cook in Somalia in 1977 who survived. On May 8, 1980, the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated: the only human disease ever wiped from the face of the Earth, proof of what the world can do together.