We've seen the eradication of smallpox.

But smallpox eradication was hard it was very, very hard.

But smallpox was the fourth disease that was intended for eradication.

Here we come down with the eradication of smallpox, better education, health service.

They point to the successes of aid the eradication of smallpox, and the distribution of tens of millions of malaria bed nets and antiretrovirals.

The Seva Foundation was started by a group of alumni of the smallpox eradication program who, having climbed the highest mountain, tasted the elixir of the success of eradicating a disease, wanted to do it again.

And obviously there's been tremendous practical applications associated with this world things like the eradication of smallpox, the advent of a vaccine against cervical cancer, which we now know is mostly caused by human papillomavirus.

It wasn't just India that had smallpox deities smallpox deities were prevalent all over the world.

One congressman here in the United States thinks that the entire investment that the U.S. put into smallpox eradication pays itself off every 26 days in foregone treatment costs and vaccination costs.

And they caught smallpox in the one remaining place that had smallpox, and they went home to die.

Smallpox early detection, early response.

We declared smallpox eradicated in 1980.

Everybody is immune to smallpox nowadays.

I wanted to show you the stages of smallpox.

Day seven, they show the classic scars of smallpox umbilication.

They are struggling with the goal of wiping out smallpox.

But in that year, smallpox exploded throughout India.

OK, now smallpox is an extremely distressing illness.

There are other kinds of smallpox that are not like that.

Flat smallpox, which killed 100 percent of people who got it.

When you read the biblical plague of boils, that was smallpox.

Pharaoh Ramses the Fifth, whose picture is here, died of smallpox.

Larry Brilliant Smallpox was the worst disease in history.

I got to see the last case of killer smallpox in the world.

The key to eradicating smallpox was early detection, early response.

In that year, there were 34 countries affected with smallpox.

So, how we eradicated smallpox was max vaccination wouldn't work.

Images of limb regeneration and faces filled with smallpox 21 percent of the conference.

In the Summer of Love, in 1967, two million people, children, died of smallpox.

But to see smallpox from the perspective of a sovereign is the wrong perspective.

I've probably had 50 women die. They all had hemorrhagic smallpox.

And India was the place where smallpox made its last stand.

We had Dr. Larry Brilliant talking about how we eradicated smallpox.

And hemorrhagic smallpox, the most cruel of all, which had a predilection for pregnant women.

He went there after the death of his wife of smallpox and brought his two young children.

To eradicate smallpox, we had to gather the largest United Nations army in history.

Eradication of poverty

Because I thought that had been eradicated in the way that smallpox had been eradicated.

And when they did, they took smallpox to 10 other countries and reignited the epidemic.

So even if somebody made the smallpox genome, that DNA itself would not cause infections.

Every time we did a house to house search, we had a spike in the number of reports of smallpox.

So, we searched and we searched, and we found every case of smallpox in India. We had a reward.

But the third challenge we have and probably even bigger one, the biggest challenge is that, in contrast to smallpox where you could always see your enemy every single person almost who was infected with smallpox had this telltale rash.

B. Eradication of poverty

There are 20 million people on the road at any time in buses and trains, walking, 500,000 villages, 120 million households, and none of them wanted to report if they had a case of smallpox in their house because they thought that smallpox was the visitation of a deity, Shitala Mata, the cooling mother, and it was wrong to bring strangers into your house when the deity was in the house. No incentive to report smallpox.