This season, the Epidemic podcast is about the eradication of smallpox in South Asia.

And to understand the breakout public health strategy that ultimately made eradication possible,

we're taking a quick detour to West Africa.

It was 1966, and Bill Faggy found himself in Nigeria.

The young physician and epidemiologist from Iowa was a long way from home,

but in good company as part of a team of health workers sent to the region

by the CDC. Their mission was to vaccinate as many people as possible to stop smallpox.

They traveled from one remote location to the next on electric bikes.

To coordinate the work and respond quickly to each new outbreak, they had two-way radios.

On December 4, 1966, I got a message saying, I think we have smallpox. Could you come and look?

We went to the place eight miles off of a road, and it was immediately clear that the first

person I saw had smallpox. And so we started looking at what did we have in the way of vaccine.

Ordinarily, you would have done a mass vaccination campaign around the area.

At the time, the standard procedure was to vaccinate every single person in the region,

but there was a problem. There wasn't enough vaccine.

Bill was still waiting on a big shipment. Without enough doses to vaccinate everyone,

his team had to break protocol and get creative.

We knew what we should do, but we couldn't. So at seven o'clock that night,

with maps in front of me, I divided the area and sent runners to the villages

to see if they had smallpox.

Twenty-four hours later, we got back on the radio.

And now I could pinpoint the exact villages where there were smallpox.

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