Smallpox was certified eradicated in 1980, but I first learned about the disease’s twisty, storied history in 1996 while interning at the World Health Organization. I was a college student fascinated by the sheer magnitude of what it took to wipe a human disease from the earth for the first time.
Over the years, I’ve turned to that history over and over, looking for inspiration and direction on how to be more ambitious when confronting other public health threats of my day.
In the late 1990s, I had the opportunity to meet some of the health-care professionals and other eradication campaign workers who helped stop the disease. I came to see that the history of this remarkable achievement had been told through the eyes mostly of white men from the United States, what was then the Soviet Union, and other parts of Europe. But I knew that there was more to tell, and I worried that the stories of legions of public health workers in South Asia could be lost forever. With its dense urban slums, sparse rural villages, complicated geopolitics, corrupt governance in some corners and punishing terrain, South Asia had been the hardest battlefield for smallpox eradicators to conquer. So I decided to capture some of that history. That work became a podcast, an eight-episode, limited-series audio documentary, called “Epidemic: Eradicating Smallpox.”