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The Last Victim (Of Smallpox)

By Glen Raphael

In 1977, Ali Maow Maalin became the last person to be infected with smallpox in the wild. He was a cook, working at a hospital in Somalia. He hadn’t gotten vaccinated because the needles looked painful and frightening.

On October 12th, an outbreak of smallpox was detected. A 6 year old girl was brought to the hospital. Ali Maow Maalin spent 15 minutes walking her to a car for quarantine. Two days later, that girl was dead.

In those 15 minutes, Ali Maalin was infected.

As his fever and rashes set in in the coming weeks, he didn’t report himself because he didn’t want to be locked away in isolation.

But eventually the disease became unmistakable. And the World Health Organization set to work containing the last smallpox outbreak. They identified 161 people that Ali had been in contact with, some living 120 kilometers from town. A total of 50,000 people were vaccinated in the months following his diagnosis.

And then, we waited.

A year past. A small outbreak at the laboratory, but it was quickly contained.

We waited.

And two years after Ali walked that girl to the car, we declared smallpox eradicated. Only a few samples of it were preserved in research laboratories in the US and Russia.

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