The Eradication of Smallpox
Academic Press, 246 pp, $49.95, 2000 ISBN 0120834758 | ISBN: 0-120-83475-8
I picked this book up with eager anticipation and put it down with a mixture of admiration and disappointment. Written by a French-speaking immunologist and translated into English, the book deals less with the eradication of smallpox than Jenner's contributions to the development of vaccination and the early history of this public health strategy. The eradication of smallpox, undoubtedly one of public health's greatest achievements, could not have occurred without Jenner's pioneering efforts in the late 18th century, but eradication was the result of international collaborative work that was only possible in the second half of the 20th century. No insight is given into the nature of the field work that went into making large countries in Africa and Asia smallpox-free, and especially into the critical strategies of disease surveillance and targeted response. The eradication campaign involved the international deployment of teams of public health workers—not all immunologists or doctors—traveling to remote parts of far away countries, looking for cases of smallpox and vaccinating to interrupt chains of transmission. This book fails to capture this essential aspect of global disease eradication—basic shoe-leather epidemiology—as relevant for polio eradication today as it was for the eradication of smallpox three decades ago. It also fails to capture the geopolitical drama behind the mounting and sustaining of a successful disease eradication program. With these deficiencies, this is a small book pretending to address a big subject.
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