Radiotopia.

From PRX.

From PRX's Radiotopia, this is Radio Diaries. I'm Joe Richmond.

More and more people are getting used to the idea that COVID-19 isn't going to disappear anytime soon.

Here's Dr. Anthony Fauci at the World Economic Forum this past January.

If you look at the history of infectious diseases, we've only eradicated one infectious

disease in man, and that's smallpox.

That's not going to happen with this virus.

Our story today is about that one disease that has been eradicated, smallpox.

Smallpox was around for thousands of years.

Some of the earliest known evidence of the virus can be found on the mummified bodies of ancient Egyptian pharaohs.

It was a horrible and visible disease.

Patients would develop painful sores all over their bodies. The most deadly

form of smallpox, called Varyola Major, killed almost a third of the people it infected.

Survivors were often scarred for life. But thanks to the availability of the world's very

first vaccine, smallpox was eliminated in the U.S. by the mid-20th century, and a few years later,

the World Health Organization came together to try to stamp out the disease once and for all.

Public health workers around the world traveled from country to country, tracking down cases

by word of mouth, and vaccinated in entire villages where the virus was found.

The last country to have cases of the deadly form of smallpox was Bangladesh, and by the fall of 1975, public health workers there thought they were at the finish line.

But often a small remote village, a toddler was developing the telltale white spots.

Today on the show, the story of that one last case.

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