
D.A. Henderson, ‘disease detective’ who eradicated smallpox, dies at 87 - okket
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/da-henderson-disease-detective-who-eradicated-smallpox-dies-at-87/2016/08/20/b270406e-63dd-11e6-96c0-37533479f3f5_story.html
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chris_va
_The campaign, which cost an estimated total of $300 million, employed a
strategy called ring vaccination that was credited to the American
epidemiologist William Foege._

Even with inflation, best 300M ever spent.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
RIP. 'The Heroes of my field have slain one of the horsemen of the
apaocalypse, while the heroes of your field have gathered in the desert to
create a new one' [https://xkcd.com/1520/](https://xkcd.com/1520/)

Deserves a black bar, doesn't it?

~~~
dankohn1
I'd like to reiterate the call for an HN black bar today. I think DA Henderson
may be responsible for saving the lives of more people than any other single
person who has ever lived. And he did it through science, but also through
executing on a plan.

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rer
Well this is a moral dilemma:

 _The only officially sanctioned stores of the smallpox virus are held at
heavily secured facilities at the CDC in Atlanta and at a Russian facility in
Siberia. Some researchers contend that the samples should be preserved for use
in the development of future vaccines or treatments._

~~~
akiselev
How so? We know that communicable diseases mutate all the time, even when they
don't have a single human host, so destroying any samples that could provide a
baseline for any future pathogen is nothing short of morally reprehensible.
Variola major is one of the deadliest diseases in human history, killing 20+%
of those infected, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions in the 20th
century alone. If these samples were destroyed and a mutated smallpox
reappears globally, it would be an unmitigated public health disaster and we'd
be crippled without being able to experimentally compare the new version to
the old. Given the stakes and nature's contempt for geopolitics, it's an
unavoidable tradeoff.

------
themartorana
_"...an achievement that was credited with saving tens of millions of
lives..."_

This is what "changing the world" actually looks like. What a life to have
led, and what a legacy!

