Every Nation's Needle

On May 8, 1980, the Thirty-Third World Health Assembly stood and did something unprecedented — they declared that humanity had defeated smallpox forever. A disease that had killed an estimated 300 million people in the twentieth century alone was gone from the earth. But the victory belonged to no single nation. When D. A. Henderson launched the WHO's Intensified Eradication Program in 1967, the campaign required something almost as miraculous as the medicine itself: cooperation.…