Smallpox, a deadly disease that plagued the world for centuries. It was a disease that anyone could get, and it killed millions of people. When it was first introduced to South America, it killed an estimated ninety percent of the indigenous population. Because of this extremely high mortality rate, everyone tried to find a cure. These cures included heat treatment, where the victim would be placed under a blanket and trapped in a room with a fire on. This was thought to kill the virus inside the body, but honestly only made the victim dehydrated, and even sicker. Another odd treatment was the red treatment. I person was placed in an all red room and told to wear all red clothing, this treatment, of course, didn’t work.

Around the 19th century, there was a breakthrough in medicine and a treatment for smallpox. A doctor named Eric Jenner had heard about the milk maids odd habit of not getting the smallpox disease because they had been exposed to cowpox, a much less deadly disease. He tested a theory of infecting an eight-year-old boy with cowpox and then infecting him with smallpox. This boy not only didn’t die, he only had a very slight reaction to this deadly disease. This miracle was then repeated time and time again, eventually spreading all over Europe, and helped many peoples survive this terrible disease. This dropped the death rate from smallpox from double digits to only one percent.

There were so many pros to this new treatment, though many people were still scared of it. There were many people who were reluctant to get this treatment, but most people eventually came to see that it worked. Over time treatment got better and better, and the World Health Organization and CDC got together and eventually tried to eradicate this disease. The used a method called surveillance and containment, which was where only the infected people were vaccinated, and the WOH would keep an eye out for anyone else to get the virus. This eventually led to the complete eradication of the disease by 1980, and the world has been free of smallpox minus lab samples ever since.