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DenisM

I am awed every time I think that we have eradicated a disease.

It’s just such a “the future is now” thing. I mean, it was 1980, but still.

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I still get a good feeling going to the Wikipedia page for smallpox and seeing the first two words of the entry:

"Smallpox was"

Don't mean to brag, but making this edit to Wikipedia felt damn good:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rinderpest&type=r...

I love knowing that I was the person to create the first Wikipedia article on resilience. I didn't have an account at the time, but the IP address is there forever. It's since been disambiguated, which makes it look only 10 years old, but the first edit was me and it was in the material science sense of the word, though now I like to think it says something more generally about me, even if I know that that type of magical thinking is hogwash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Resilience_(mater...

There's a whole "Is vs Was" discussion on the Talk page, for anyone tempted to re-litigate the matter. I'll just point out that other extinct items are often worded like "The dodo is an extinct bird..."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Smallpox [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo

Check your sentence diagram.

The extinctness of the dodo is present tense. Therefore, it is an extinct bird.

The dodo was a ground nesting bird that inhabited the island of Mauritius. But it's still extinct.

It's still the only one we've eradicated insofar as I can recollect... (Polio will, hopefully, follow in the coming decades.)

Aside - Good video series by Yale for anyone interested in the history of diseases in western society:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoWxdlGBVTI&list=PL7C32775F0...

Rinderpest was an infectious disease of cattle, which was eradicated slightly more recently. A cattle disease might seem like a weird priority, but for marginal cattle farmers in poor nations your cows dying basically means very likely you'll starve. So in effect we wiped out one cause of poor people starving to death.

From what I can tell, wild Polio cases have been in the low double digits the past couple years. Hopefully it will be gone by the end of next decade.

It's a bit more complex than that. The Smallpox vaccine was based on the virus of another species. The Polio virus is based on a weakened human virus - which, unfortunately, sometimes becomes infectious again and that is a problem in its own right. Also, the last pockets of infection are basically in war zones where it's difficult to get the vaccines to. But hopefully you're right - maybe we'll eradicate it in the next few decades.

OPV is a weakened virus, that's why you took it orally, but the modern vaccine isn't, it's a conventional killed virus vaccine and, since it's dead, can't cause polio.

Unfortunately the modern vaccine is also much more expensive (which is a problem in poor countries) and much less effective (which is a problem in countries with endemic polio).

I thought viruses weren't alive as such?

Viruses being alive is a debated topic and doesn’t have an objective distinction from what I understand.

Sure, and neither is a car. But we understand if someone says "My car is dead" they don't mean merely that they switched off the ignition.

If you prefer another word is "inactivated".

"bricked"

Anyhow, I'd like a more precise description of the difference between "weakened" and "dead/inactive" (which is what the parent of my comment was about).

There are two polio vaccines - the conventional live-attenuated polio vaccine works really well in developing settings, because it's cheap, multi-dose, and vaccinated individuals shed virus, which give people who were previously or un-vaccinated some protection via exposure.

But if we ever get down to actually thinking "These are the last 5 cases..." it's entirely possible to use the killed virus formulation used in the U.S. and Europe.

Where those cases are is a bigger pain.

We're getting damned close with guinea worms -- down from 3.5 million cases in 1986 to 22 in 2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_dracunculiasis

May the day when it drops to zero come soon.

I do hope we get a full genomic sequence of it before it's gone, though. Anything that has co-evolved dealing with the human immune system for so long likely has useful tricks up its sleeve if they were applied for medical use.

And considering how much suffering this parasite has caused, it is a nice thought to think that humanity might get some benefit out of it beyond simply stopping the cycle of pain.

They're currently sequencing the hell out of it to figure out why it's attacking dogs and what they can do about that.

Glad to hear it, and I hope they come up with a canine solution with speed.

The parasite evolved to attack dogs, unfortunately, so there 500 cases of dracunculiasis in dogs were reported in Chad in 2015. So there's a new reservoir. Still, there is hope.

Being cynical, you could say this was before the internet - if we tried something similar today, no doubt the few people in the world with conspiracy theories about the small pox vaccine would find each other on some shadowy crackpot forum, start a facebook group, make a professional looking pseudoscientific website, find an ageing B celebrity to endorse them, make an extreme video that starts appearing in algorithmic feeds, launch a facebook ad campaign targeting both the anti-establishment left and conspiracy laden alt-right, get endorsed on twitter by Trump and other populists, crowdfund some junk science research that gets published in a predatory journal (hopefully not the Lancet again) and sooner or later the chance to eradicate small pox is lost.

We may have hit peak future, and are now heading down the other side...

We were really lucky to get that done before AIDS. The classic smallpox vaccine is a live-virus vaccine and dangerous to people with compromised immune systems. There's a newer non-replicating vaccine, but that didn't come out until 2014.[1]

[1] http://www.bavarian-nordic.com/pipeline/imvamune.aspx

I've just learned that vaccinating people suffering from AIDS makes any sense at all (that their immune system benefits from it); thanks. Do you have any pointers to a more extensive treatment of that topic (it's hard to search for due to popularity of articles about research into vaccinating against HIV)?

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/58/3/e44/336537

The term to use is "immune compromised host"

When I was a boy, I had something-or-other that made me at very high risk for complications if I took the Smallpox vaccine. When we traveled to Africa in the 1960s, my mother had to take special documentation proving that I culd not take the vaccine, and that I had been tested for Smallpox.

My understanding is that it was regulations prohibiting travel between countries by unvaccinated persons that helped eradicate Smallpox, and my paperwork is now a quaint story about a bygone era.

Or it would be, if I didn’t remember the whole thing afresh every time anti-vaxxers demand the “right” to send their unvaccinated children into public schools.

We haven't eradicated it though. I guess it's a bit dated now, but you might enjoy "The Demon in the Freezer," written by the same fellow who wrote "The Hot Zone" (a pop history of Ebola Reston).

Me too. Then I am awed once again when I remember the if the current anti-vaccination trend continues, we might never do it again. As I read in another HN comment yesterday: "we, humans, can do great things, but we are also great at getting in our own way".

I thought some tiny pockets of smallpox came back recently..

No, you are thinking of Polio. Live smallpox only exists in two research centers, one in the US and one in Russia.

We will hopefully eradicate polio soon.

We've eradicated many species.

Some of them were a damn good thing to get rid of!

Rockets landing themselves all backwards is pretty amazing no matter how often I see it.

Rockets don't do that.....

Retrorockets and landing backwards have been around (e.g. the Apollo lunar module). The rockets landing backwards thing is hard for a different reason among many other things, namely the inverted pendulum problem.

I get what you're saying but... the first part is obviously not what I was saying ;)

Yep. That was the bit when aliens should have landed and made their selves known saying "alright guys, you've passed." as they then go on to share the wisdom of the rest of the universe. Was disappointed they didn't. I guess we have to show them a few more tricks.

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