smallpox

Maybe one wave was dominated by smallpox-like disease, another by something more measles-like, all of it blurred together in later memory as a single great pestilence.

There's also the possibility that we're trying too hard to jam an ancient virus into one of our modern named boxes.

Variola, the smallpox virus, evolved over time.

So did measles.

A second century strain might not map perfectly onto what doctors saw in the twentieth century.

There are a few words public health workers and officials use that sound similar, but which describe substantially different achievements.

If a disease has been eradicated, it no longer circulates naturally anywhere in the world, as is the case with smallpox.

The last known natural case was recorded in Somalia in 1977, and the World Health Organization declared the disease eradicated in 1980.

There have been no natural smallpox outbreaks ever since.

That is a truly remarkable global achievement, and it is why routine smallpox vaccination is no longer necessary for most people today.

Elimination is more local and more conditional.

It means sustained transmission of a disease has been interrupted in a defined place, like within the borders of a country.

This detail matters more than it sounds like it should.

Decades later, Smallpox is going to rip through the Continental Army hard enough that Washington eventually makes the genuinely bold call to inoculate his entire force against the wishes of a Congress terrified of the risk.

A decision this show is going to spend real time on when we get to the war chapters.

A young George Washington nearly dying of smallpox on a pointless trip to try to save his dying brother's health is the exact reason the general leading the revolution decades later understood, in his own body, exactly what that disease could do to an army, and had the personal experience to gamble on fixing it.

One of them human, one of them animal.

Smallpox no longer exists on the face of the earth.

It killed a third of the people that got it, and now none because everybody got vaccinated and we got rid of it.

1978, declared eradicated,