The authors of the Big Red Book had led the World Health Organization campaign to eradicate smallpox from the face of the earth, and on December 9, 1979, their efforts were officially certified a success. The disease no longer existed in nature. Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity on earth.
All of this is crazy.
