The End of Smallpox

We want to let you know about a new show from Radiotopia Presents. It's called We're Doing the Whiz. Was there ever a moment in your life that you look back on and go, how did someone let that fly? For creators Ian Koss and Sakina Ibrahim, it was their very white high school's production of The Wiz, the black retelling of The Wizard of Oz. This wasn't just any production. It brought protests and news coverage to their small Massachusetts town.

And there was even a busing program to diversify the cast. On We're Doing the Whiz, Ian and Sakina explore the controversy 20 years later and discuss the questions of race and representation that still hold true today. Listen to We're Doing the Wiz wherever you get your podcasts. From PRX's Radiotopia, this is Radio Diaries. I'm Joe Richman.

Vaccines have been in the news recently. Over the past few weeks, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. changed vaccination recommendations for kids and pregnant people and gutted an influential committee that recommends which shots Americans should get. Some experts worry that the changes could lead to outbreaks of diseases that the U.S. has long had under control. So this week, we're revisiting a story we did a couple years ago about the world's very first vaccine.

and the disease it helped eradicate. 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 variola major, killed almost a third of the people it infected. Survivors were often scarred for life.

But thanks to a vaccine, smallpox was eliminated from the U.S. in 1949. A few years later, public health workers around the world came together to try to stamp out the disease once and for all. They traveled from country to country, tracking down cases by word of mouth, and vaccinated 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 off in a small remote village, a toddler was developing the telltale white spots. Today on the show... the story of that one last case. My name is Rohima Banu. Growing up my village was called South Guralia. It was close to the river. My house was made of cattle leaves. and it had a mud floor. My father was a laborer. He caught fish.

and cut down trees with a saw. My mother was a housewife. I was their first child and I was adored. When I was one and half years old, I had a small pulse. My name is Daniel Tarantola. And back in 1975, I was a medical officer with WHO assigned to Bangladesh for the eradication of smallpox. My name is Alan Schnur, and I was a WHO epidemiologist in Bangladesh. The smallpox already consumed campaign had been an exhausting exercise.

long travels by boat and in Land Rovers and whatnot. And so we were celebrating the end of a very difficult road. We were at a meeting in Dhaka at that time. They had a zero up on the wall saying these are currently the number of active smallpox cases in Bangladesh. And we had informed the press. I understand that you have an official statement today with regard to Bangladesh. Yes, indeed. As far as can be determined, we believe we have seen the last case of the deadliest form of smallpox.

Variola Major. Well, thank you very much, Dr. Henderson. I'd like to thank my colleagues here in New York. Then we decided to celebrate and we organized a party. And as we were having the party... we received three telexes, two of them saying wonderful achievements, congratulations. And then a third message came from our team based in Bola Island, in the Bureau of Bengal. Give me a second because I can read the message. One active smallpox case.

Date of detection 14 November 1975. Details follow. So this was a pretty dramatic setback. My uncle got sick. and i went up to him and jumped on him and started playing with these marks he had on his body on that very night my mother saw three pimples break out in my forehead And by the morning, I had it all over my body. Our goal was to go to the home where the case had been found. and check that indeed those facial scars and other scars on our body were being caused by smallpox.

There was some civil unrest at the time, so they had announced that all WHO international staff are restricted to DACA. We got into the jeep and slouched down. I put some sort of cloth over my head. so we wouldn't see that there was this international WHO staff breaking the regulations. We then got on to the launch. The next day we arrived in the morning.

It took this very flimsy boat with no life rafts across this huge river. And then we had to walk up to the household where the smallpox case was. My mother saw a lot of people coming towards us. It looked like avoiding celebration. It was so many people. So my mother picked me up. so that they wouldn't see me. It was the end of the day, so it was fairly dark outside and there was a chaos and lantern inside the house giving a little light.

We found a woman sitting there on a bed, bamboo bed, holding a child. The child, she had white spots on the face, on the palms, on the soles. on the legs and arms and she began to cry and i took a picture of her then crying and the mother holding her in her arms they have that photo of us i was little

and I was afraid of all the people. My mother was shocked. She couldn't say a single word. We explained to her what the procedure would be, that we would have to isolate the child in her home. that there would be guards around, that visitors would be limited but would have to be vaccinated. They set up three camps around our house and they paid our neighbors to watch us so that we wouldn't try to run away. Everyone in that area made money from it.

And they can start on that side. And the other one, the other one will start then on the white side. And I said, OK, we need to organize containment now. The best way to stop smallpox is to vaccinate. We hired volunteers from the neighborhood to... vaccinate everyone within a 1.5 mile radius of the house. The vaccine comes in two vials and this is the vaccine here. People were trained over a couple of hours. We gave them needles. And here is a needle.

We had to mix the vaccine, then dip your needle there. You see, you just hit the skin 15 times like this. People in the village were afraid that they would die from the vaccine. Some didn't want to take it out of fear. For them to be confident that there was no risk in vaccinating people, we used to vaccinate ourselves. I must have vaccinated myself 10,000 times in Bangladesh during the time I was there.

And usually, when there was enough time taken to listen to their concerns, the acceptance of vaccination is very high. OK, is it clear now? All right, we go vaccinate. Off we went house by house in the middle of the night to knock on doors.

I remember one house, it was a two-story house, and this guy, he opened the window and says, are you crazy? It's two o'clock in the morning. What are you doing here? Go away, go away. So he continued knocking politely on the door, saying, well, you know, we can't leave until we vaccinate.

We realized over the following three weeks that there was no other active case, that is, infectious case on the island. We knew at the time that we were... taking part in a quite historic event. When we started smallpox eradication, people said, you're crazy, you can never eradicate smallpox. And then eventually we, of course, achieved smallpox eradication. And then people said, what took you so long? Today, a substantial milestone in human history.

The World Health Organization says smallpox has now been wiped off the face of the earth and will never return. It says it'll never return because smallpox can only be caught from another person. and if no other person has it, there is no other way to catch it. I haven't seen Rahima Banu since the time I was in Kuralia Village, but I understand that she's doing very well. And she has some fame as being the last variola major smallpox case in the world.

I was named the last person to have smallpox. Allah kept me alive. But I still have scars from my disease. It's a dot-dot-dotted spot all over my body. I don't look beautiful with these scars. Sometimes... people discriminate against me if i wouldn't have had this disease honestly i could have married off to a wealthy family but i have a husband

He is a daily laborer. He didn't see me before we married, but he accepted me. He likes me as I am. I'm healthy. I have a family. I have children. My parents are alive. I have everything. Our story was produced by Elisa Escarse, with reporting and translation by Dil Afroz Jahan. It was edited by Ben Shapiro, Deborah George, and me. Additional translation help from Kassara Hassan.

The Rated Iris team also includes Nellie Gillis and Micah Hazel. We are proud members of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best independent podcasts around. I'm Joe Richman. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.