D.A. Henderson, ‘disease detective’ who eradicated smallpox, dies at 87 | Hacker News Reader

D.A. Henderson, ‘disease detective’ who eradicated smallpox, dies at 87

washingtonpost.com

105 pointsokket10 comments

The campaign, which cost an estimated total of $300 million, employed a strategy called ring vaccination that was credited to the American epidemiologist William Foege.

Even with inflation, best 300M ever spent.

RIP. 'The Heroes of my field have slain one of the horsemen of the apaocalypse, while the heroes of your field have gathered in the desert to create a new one' https://xkcd.com/1520/

Deserves a black bar, doesn't it?

I'd like to reiterate the call for an HN black bar today. I think DA Henderson may be responsible for saving the lives of more people than any other single person who has ever lived. And he did it through science, but also through executing on a plan.

I want to see how the next person in line on that comic describes Fritz Haber.

Even though physics is my field I like the xkcd.

The fun part about eliminating the disease is that the cumulative benefit never starts going down - as long as there are people, they will benefit.

Well this is a moral dilemma:

The only officially sanctioned stores of the smallpox virus are held at heavily secured facilities at the CDC in Atlanta and at a Russian facility in Siberia. Some researchers contend that the samples should be preserved for use in the development of future vaccines or treatments.

How so? We know that communicable diseases mutate all the time, even when they don't have a single human host, so destroying any samples that could provide a baseline for any future pathogen is nothing short of morally reprehensible. Variola major is one of the deadliest diseases in human history, killing 20+% of those infected, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions in the 20th century alone. If these samples were destroyed and a mutated smallpox reappears globally, it would be an unmitigated public health disaster and we'd be crippled without being able to experimentally compare the new version to the old. Given the stakes and nature's contempt for geopolitics, it's an unavoidable tradeoff.

Well, there are probably more than a few samples in people who died and froze. Maybe there's some smallpox up on Mt Everest for instance.

"...an achievement that was credited with saving tens of millions of lives..."

This is what "changing the world" actually looks like. What a life to have led, and what a legacy!

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