Smallpox killed on a scale almost nothing else has — roughly a third of everyone it infected, and more people in the 20th century than every war of that century combined. Then, for the only time in human history, a coordinated global campaign made a disease disappear. It did not happen by accident, and it did not stay finished quite as cleanly as the record likes to say.
Every other page on this site shows a disease spreading. This one runs in reverse: a decade-long retreat, continent by continent, that ended with a single unluckier footnote after the campaign had already succeeded. Circles mark the last confirmed case in each region and when it happened.
The interactive map could not load. The last-case milestones — Brazil (1971), India and Bangladesh (1975), Ethiopia (1976), Somalia (1977), and Birmingham, UK (1978) — remain listed below.
Centuries before Jenner, healers across China, India, and the Ottoman Empire practiced variolation — deliberately infecting a healthy person with matter from a mild smallpox case to trigger immunity. It worked, most of the time. It also killed roughly 1–2% of the people it was meant to protect, and could still spread the disease to others. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had survived smallpox and lost a brother to it, brought the practice to England in 1721.
In 1796, Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who'd caught cowpox — a mild relative of smallpox — never seemed to catch the real thing. He deliberately infected an eight-year-old boy with cowpox, then exposed him to smallpox itself. The boy stayed healthy. It was reckless by any modern standard, and it was also the first vaccine ever made against any disease — vaccina, Latin for "of the cow," gave the practice its name.
Pustular lesions consistent with smallpox are found on the mummified skin of Ramesses V, who died around 1145 BCE — the earliest physical evidence of the disease.
Physicians in China and India are already deliberately exposing patients to matter from mild cases, trading a small, controlled risk for immunity.
Having survived smallpox and lost her brother to it, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brings variolation from the Ottoman Empire to England.
Edward Jenner tests his cowpox theory on eight-year-old James Phipps, creating the first vaccine against any disease.
Britain's Vaccination Act mandates smallpox vaccination for infants — one of the first national vaccine mandates anywhere.
Routine vaccination clears smallpox from North America and most of Europe, even as it still kills millions a year elsewhere.
The World Health Assembly calls for global eradication, but funding and commitment are thin. The disease barely notices.
In Nigeria, CDC epidemiologist William Foege runs short of vaccine and abandons mass campaigns for surveillance-and-containment instead — ring vaccination works better than the original plan ever did.
WHO relaunches the campaign with real funding, D.A. Henderson leading a coordinated global push, and ring vaccination as doctrine.
Brazil records the last case anywhere in the Americas.
Rahima Banu, age two, in Bangladesh, becomes the last person infected with Variola major — the deadlier of the two smallpox strains — anywhere on Earth.
Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Merca, Somalia, becomes the last person ever infected with smallpox outside a laboratory.
Janet Parker dies in Birmingham after a laboratory containment failure — the disease's final victim, a year after its natural extinction.
The World Health Assembly formally certifies the global eradication of smallpox — the only time humanity has erased a human disease from the wild.
Mpox, a viral cousin, spreads globally for the first time — moving into some of the immunity gap left by decades without routine smallpox vaccination.
Every other diagram on this site shows something declining. This one climbs: instead of racing to vaccinate everyone, teams found each case, then vaccinated only the ring of people around it — fast enough to break the chain before it spread further. It beat mass vaccination to zero using a fraction of the doses. Hover a step to read it.
By August 1978, the world's last natural case was already a year in the past. Janet Parker, a medical photographer at Birmingham Medical School, worked one floor above a research laboratory that still studied live smallpox virus. Investigators traced her infection to a fault in a shared service duct that let virus drift upward from the lab into her workspace — a decade of fieldwork undone by a few feet of ductwork.
She died on September 11, 1978, eleven months after the disease's last natural case. Her mother caught it from her and survived; the lab's director, Professor Henry Bedson, died by suicide during the investigation that followed. The lab was closed for good, and the case forced a permanent rewrite of the rules: after 1978, live smallpox virus would legally exist in only two places on Earth.
Smallpox is the only disease human beings have ever erased from the wild — proof that a funded, coordinated, unglamorous public-health campaign can finish what it starts. But it's also the only disease that could come back by decision rather than chance: two declared stockpiles still exist, a 2017 study proved a related virus could be built from mail-order DNA, and routine vaccination ended decades ago, leaving most of the world with no immunity to the family of viruses it belongs to — a gap mpox is already finding its way into. We know exactly how to win this fight. Whether we do it again is a choice, not a rerun.
Figures are approximate, drawn from WHO smallpox eradication records and published historical accounts. Verify against WHO and CDC references before operational use.