The Man Who Saved 200,000,000 Lives

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The Rise & Fall of the Worst Disease in History

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"hurr durr this video aged well"
monkeypox and polio are not smallpox

BritMonkey
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When I was a preschooler, I was one of the last cases of Smallpox in North America. I caught the disease in Mexico. The disease left more than physical scars. When I entered school, I could not draw faces. Every human I saw during the more than a year I was hospitalized wore a mask.
A year or two after I entered Kindergarten, I underwent painful plastic surgery to hide the scars. This left plastic ties in my skin. While I grew up these thin strands plastic began to fall out. When other teenagers where fighting zits, I fought plastic micro-sutures. I found one of last of these in the shower when I was in my late 60s.
I am glad my offspring will not have to deal with this disease.

rogercoppock
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"Smallpox was" probably some of the greatest words ever spoken

pattyboi
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We really have a nasty habit of forgetting just how awful aspects of the past were, and how much we take their absence for granted.

johnpaulcross
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I was last vaccinated for smallpox in 1971 in the military with my parents. I have the scars on my right arm, kind of on top of one another. I’m turning 73 next month.

mariekatherine
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Honestly the most touching part was the resolution to eradicate smallpox being unanimous. Really shows what we as a species are capable of when we all put our differences aside for a greater cause.

bdf
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Man it's such a damn shame we don't celebrate true heroes like this doctor...

phanCAbe
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I just finished watching your "Being alive is good, actually" video and this one and I just want to say that it gave me a much needed boost in positivity. Humanity may be full of horrible people and events but the fight of good against evil and the peoples common enemies is truly inspiring and a real tearjerker.

Kobratero
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The last case of Smallpox in the world occured in a Birmingham UK hospital in 1978, a research scientist contracted the disease and sadly died. The profesorr in charge of the unit commited suicide believing he caused the release of the virus from the laboritory, but was later completely exonerated .

rogerwilliams
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The last ever smallpox death was really depressing.

A 40 year old medical photographer called Janet Parker caught it in a lab in the UK. Shortly before her death, her father died of cardiac arrest while visiting her, and the head of her department committed suicide.

morbidsearch
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I love those times in human history where there was some apparently impossible task and humanity’s answer was:

“So we sat down, had a good think, got up, and did it.”

Truly makes me hopeful for more of those.

benjaminsantelices
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200, 000, 000? That's cute. I save billions of bacteria by just not showering. Aren't I noble?

calamitycanyon
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This video is so beautifully done. Wonderful work. Viktor Zhdanov is hardly mentioned in whatever articles I've read. But thanks to this video, half a million people now know about him.

This line on wiki gets to me - "Search complete. No cases discovered. Ali Maow Maalin is the world's last known smallpox case."

PintoConrad
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Smallpox Eradication Day should be a holiday celebrated worldwide, rather than an unknown factoid we take for granted.

WeibenWang
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My dad has a scar on his arm from his smallpox vaccine, and the story he told me as a kid when I asked about it - the story of how humanity straight up eradicated smallpox, and how successful efforts were underway to do the same to diseases like polio - always fascinated me. The things we as a species are capable of when we focus on the bigger picture instead of our pathetic little power struggles, is mind-numbing, both in the sheer scale of it and the sheer stupidity of our not doing it.

ArkenTheAmerikan
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"Politician lie, agents spy, people die" One of the best lines I've heard

amudeas
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Those headlines at 23:40 give me chills and goosebumps. The words "smallpox was" got me choked up a little. When I first discovered that smallpox, or any disease, had been eradicated, I was struck by how I was in my early 20s and had never learned in school and was completely unaware that any disease had been _eradicated._ As in it virtually doesn't exist anymore. I tried to find news reports from the period announcing the official death of a disease, but again, to my surprise, I couldn't find any. Imagine if everyone just forgot that the Moon landings happened. Because this is an achievement _at least_ equal to the Moon landings.

geisaune
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It's a tragedy that a man so deserving of a Nobel Prize probably wasn't even nominated.

randybentley
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I like his editing style and how he shows additional information within the video without talking about it

DayilarinDayisi
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My high school biology teacher grew up in West Africa (idk what country exactly), and her mother was either involved in anti-smallpox campaigns or just lived in a really remote area, and she knew of witch doctors in the area who still had dried smallpox scabs sitting around, for use in curses and other folk magic. Fearing that those samples, even though they were probably too old to have live smallpox, she got her and her family vaccinated against smallpox. She said she was probably among the youngest people to be vaccinated (she’s about 40 I think).

lukasuhlenkamp