CHAPTER 1

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SMALLPOXCHAPTER 1 eradicating an ancient scourgeEastern Nigeria, December 1966. !e message came through on the radio a crackly transmission car-rying news of a smallpox outbreak in the bush. !e missionaries had set up a ham radio network covering parts of the Ogoja region of eastern Nigeria where they were working in support of the country s national smallpox campaign. Every day at 7 pm they tuned in to share news and check that none of them had fallen ill. !e report ended with a request for Dr William Foege to come out to the village and take a look. Foege had his doubts. He had been working in Nigeria as a medical missionary long enough to know that chickenpox was sometimes mistaken for the far more serious disease. However, he knew that only around 35% of the popula-tion was supposed to have been vaccinated against smallpox in that region. And an outbreak, even if only rumoured, was too important to be ignored. So Foege and his team set o# that day, bumping their way over rutted roads, eventually $nding the village 15 km from the an ancient scourge31When countries gather for the world health Assembly each year one question often comes up: whether or not to destroy the last remaining stocks of the smallpox virus.

5 Smallpox When WHO was founded In 1948, when the World Health Organization (WHO) came into being, the smallpox virus was infecting about 50 …

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