TECHNOLOGY × EXTINCTIONS

A Species Deliberately Ended

1980 CE

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Holocene · Meghalayan

Smallpox was not defeated by vaccinating everyone. Teams found each remaining outbreak and ringed it with vaccinated contacts, leaving the virus no one to infect, household by household across three continents. The last natural case was in Somalia in 1977. Certification took two more years of searching for a transmission that was no longer there.

Why it matters

The only extinction on this timeline that was planned, carried out and welcomed. The method is the part worth keeping: a disease need not be stopped everywhere at once, only wherever it happens to be. That is a far smaller problem, and it is why the campaign finished what mass vaccination alone had not.

Dating & uncertainty

What 1980 marks is the certification, not the last case. Between them lie the two years of searching it took to establish that transmission had stopped everywhere.

Sources

1. Foege (1998), Bulletin of the World Health Organization · Smallpox eradication in west and central Africa revisited
2. Ladnyi & Breman (1983), Journal of Hygiene, Epidemiology, Microbiology and Immunology · Five years of freedom from smallpox
3. Riedel (2005), Proceedings (Baylor University Medical Center) · Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination

Earth history as one day

23:59:59.9991875 µs before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day