Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay

How to Eradicate a Disease

We eradicated smallpox in 1980. What’s next?

In 1980 small pox was declared officially eradicated worldwide. In 2015, strain 2 of the polio virus was eliminated and this past October, strain 3 of the polio virus was also declared eradicated by the World Health Organization. That leaves only strain 1 of the polio virus left to deal with to completely eradicate polio in our modern world.

It was 1949. 
“I was playing with other children at a lawn party and developed such a terrible headache we had to go home. When I woke up the next morning, my legs were so weak I couldn’t stand on them and I could barely lift my arms. It took all day for the doctor to visit the house and examine me, and that night I was taken to the Englewood Hospital in Bridgeport and put in an iron lung.”
For the rest of Judith Beatty's tragic and compelling story of her survival and life with polio, see this post.

Thankfully, in most of today’s countries, this no longer happens and even when polio is contracted, we certainly don’t put patients in an iron lung anymore!

How did we accomplish these feats of eradication and what do we need to do to eradicate many other infectious diseases? It turns out that there are 5 conditions that need to be satisfied in order to eradicate a…