Wednesday, August 1, 2018

A Welcome Extinction

A map at Our World in Data shows in what decade a nation eliminated smallpox. The disease was considered eradicated in 1977.

As you would expect, nations with more advanced medical knowledge wiped the bug out first. Iceland, apparently, bid smallpox sjáumst síðar before the 20th century even started. Some other Nordic countries followed soon after, as did the island nations of Australia and Madagascar. The disease probably didn't have much of a hold in those areas, and their isolation made the eradication simpler.

From those places, the virus was rolled up through the 1970s until that final erasure in 1977.  Of course, that's supposing that smallpox doesn't linger hidden in the nations of Mongolia, Cuba, Greenland or Papua New Guinea. The map says there's no data for those places. It may never have actually taken hold in Greenland and it could just be that Papua New Guinea doesn't have any collected data. Mongolia has a lot of remote areas that no outsiders visit, and it wouldn't really matter what Cuba says because dictatorships lie. 

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