Abstract
One of the greatest advances in health in the 20th century is the elimination of the human reservoir of smallpox virus with eradication of the naturally occurring disease from the face of the earth. In 1967, at the inception of the World Health Organization's (WHO) intensified eradication program, 131,697 cases of smallpox were reported, but it was estimated that in the same year there actually were 10 to 15 million cases of smallpox with 2 million deaths.1 The last case of naturally occurring smallpox was diagnosed only a decade later in Merca, Somalia, on October 26, 1977. The lesson of . . .

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