How many smallpox cases per year

In Europe, smallpox is estimated to have claimed 60 million lives in the 18th century alone. In the 20th century, it killed some million people globally. The human fight against smallpox dates back some 2, years. In Asia, a technique known as variolation involved deliberately infecting a person by blowing dried smallpox scabs up their nose.

Those who received this treatment contracted a mild form of the disease, developing a lifelong immunity. A key breakthrough came in when an experiment by English doctor Edward Jenner showed that inoculation using closely related cowpox could protect against smallpox. Jenner's discovery paved the way for later vaccination programs—especially crucial since there is no effective treatment for smallpox.

In , a year when some 10 million to 15 million people contracted smallpox, the World Health Organization launched a worldwide eradication campaign based on vaccination. Gradually, the disease was pushed back to the Horn of Africa, and the last known natural case occurred in Somalia in Despite being consigned to the history books, there's still a chance of smallpox coming back to haunt us—as a biological weapon.

Such fears escalated dramatically in the United States following the September 11, , terrorist attacks. While the risk of such a bioterror attack is considered very low, the U. All rights reserved. Smallpox Inspections A young Native American boy in Yukon Territory is checked for smallpox and vaccinated against the disease in this circa photograph. Early Victims Smallpox is thought to have originated in India or Egypt at least 3, years ago.

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Travel 5 pandemic tech innovations that will change travel forever These digital innovations will make your next trip safer and more efficient. But will they invade your privacy? Go Further. After all, no disease had ever been eradicated before. There were billions of people in the world, under myriad governments, many of them in regions actively at war. Global coordination on the scale eradication would demand was unprecedented. Plus, there had already been a failed attempt to eradicate malaria.

The goal of eliminating every smallpox case in the world, rather than just suppressing the virus, sounded implausibly lofty. But other advances had brought it within reach. Needle technology had improved, with new bifurcated needles making it possible to use less vaccine. Overseas travel improved, which made it easier to ship vaccines and get public health workers where they were most needed, and provided impetus for worldwide eradication as it made it more likely that a smallpox outbreak anywhere in the world could spread.

A outbreak in New York City, traced back to a traveler from Mexico , resulted in a frantic effort to vaccinate 6 million people in four weeks. Europe, Henderson says, repeatedly saw the virus reintroduced by travelers from Asia, with 23 distinct importations different occasions of someone bringing smallpox into the country in five years.

As Henderson and Foege detail in their books , there were extraordinary challenges that often looked utterly insurmountable in the quest to eradicate smallpox. In poor corners of the world, there were no roads or hospitals and no infrastructure to notify the WHO of a smallpox outbreak. Civil wars, famines, and refugee crises made disease surveillance and vaccination very difficult. But other features of smallpox made it easier to eradicate than many other diseases.

That meant that once it was destroyed in humans, it would be gone forever. And, once a person has survived it, they are immune for life. Only one vaccine is needed for immunity in almost all cases.

Henderson calls the switch to ring vaccination a pivotal strategic change for the fight against smallpox. Instead of fighting for percent vaccination, which was proving unachievable in low-income countries, it let public health teams focus their resources where they were needed most.

As large parts of the world were declared smallpox-free, resources could be more intensively focused in the areas where outbreaks were still happening. Contact tracers tried to identify everyone exposed and figure out where the virus might have come from.

Communities were swiftly vaccinated. Case numbers kept declining. In , the world marked the last wild Variola major case, in Bangladesh. In , it marked the last wild Variola minor case, in Somalia. Doctors tracked down and vaccinated every potential contact of the case; none of them contracted the disease. Surveillance around the world found no more cases anywhere. It called on scientists and researchers from around the world, including collaborations between rival countries in the middle of the Cold War.

Wild polio has been eradicated in Africa and remains only in conflict-torn regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Why has it been so hard to build on our success with smallpox?

One part of it is that many diseases present all the challenges that smallpox did — plus some additional ones. Some, like HIV or Covid, have asymptomatic transmission, which makes disease surveillance trickier.

But as far as things that we can control, there are some takeaways. The first is that the smallpox eradication program took both heroic efforts and a well-funded, well-supported public health system. People trying to do disease surveillance and vaccination in war-torn, dangerous, remote parts of the world are risking their lives in our current fight.

They can only succeed if their efforts are matched by a commitment by governments of rich countries not to leave poor countries behind, to meet the funding needs of an eradication project, and not to undermine one with CIA spy operations that imitate vaccine campaigns.

Another critical takeaway is that once the work has succeeded, we have to make sure never to undermine it. He wants them destroyed lest some accident or malicious act unleash smallpox on the world again. The development of the smallpox vaccination, which was the first successfully developed vaccine the word vaccination comes from the Latin word for cow;" vacca ", as cowpox was used to develop the smallpox vaccine , greatly contributed to the significant decline in infant and child mortality across the globe, and the boom in population growth during the twentieth century.

Reported cases In spite of these large numbers, the figures for reported cases was only a tiny fraction of this; for example, the WHO estimates that there were fifty million cases in , however less than one percent of these cases were recorded.

In spite of this, the data is still useful for showing how smallpox developed and spread throughout the world; we know that the majority of these cases were recorded in the Indian sub-continent, and that epidemics across Asia drove the number of recorded cases up in the middle of the century. The final naturally-occurring cases were observed in , while the two cases in were due to a lab accident in England, which resulted in one fatality.

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Register for free Already a member? More information. Supplementary notes. Other statistics on the topic. Historical Data Number of reported cases of smallpox in the United States Historical Data Smallpox death rate in select European countries during the Great Pandemic Historical Data Smallpox death rate in Britain Historical Data Share of total deaths due to smallpox by age during the Great Pandemic of Aaron O'Neill.

Research expert covering historical data. Profit from additional features with an Employee Account.