Smallpox, one of the deadliest diseases in the history of the human race, is also the only virus completely eradicated. The history of its eradication offers lessons for us today.
Smallpox is believed to have originated over 3,000 years ago. By the 18th Century it had spread worldwide. Those who became infected often died (33%). Those who survived were doomed to miserable lives.
At first, the treatment for controlling smallpox was to inject the smallpox virus into healthy people. The thought was that small exposures to the virus would lead to mild cases of smallpox, and then they become immune to smallpox.
An English doctor, Edward Jenner, was able to develop a vaccine for smallpox in 1801, but smallpox remained in many parts of the world through the 20th Century. In 1959, the World Health Organization (WHO) developed a plan to rid the world of smallpox.
The problem was that there was a lack of funds and personnel to conduct mass vaccinations. Also, vaccine conspiracies keep some nations leaders from supporting vaccination of their citizens. Clearly something needed to change, or this deadly disease would continue.
William Foege of the Center for Disease Control in America and Viktor Zhdanov a Russian Scientist collaborated on a strategy to eliminate smallpox. They called their strategy surveillance and containment. We might call it doing more with less.
The strategy developed by Foege and Zhdanov focused on active cases of smallpox. They isolated these people and vaccinated everyone within a ring of their contacts. This allowed less vaccine to be used making an eradication effort feasible.
Technology also helped. An injection needle invented in the 1960’s was cheaper and was more efficient in vaccine delivery. It also required less training. Another advance was the creation of a freeze-dried version of the vaccine. This made it more accessible for regions of the world where refrigeration was limited. Eventually, conspiracy-prone national leaders became accepting of the vaccine. The last reported case of smallpox was in 1977.
Doing more with less is often an empty gesture meant to justify reductions in staff, budgets, or other resources. In this case, doing more with less was truly a breakthrough. What was the difference? There was a well-developed plan. The plan was enabled by new uses of technology that had been available but not used. And professionals were in charge.
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“Simplicity isn’t less – it’s more of what matters.” – Unknown