Abstract
An expansive, worldwide smallpox eradication programme (SEP) was announced by the World Health Assembly in 1958, leading this decision-making body to instruct the World Health Organization Headquarters in Geneva to work with WHO regional offices to engage and draw in national governments to ensure success. Tabled by the Soviet Union's representative and passed by a majority vote by member states, the announcement was subject to intense diplomatic negotiations. This led to the formation, expansion and reshaping of an ambitious and complex campaign that cut across continents and countries. This article examines these inter-twining international, regional and national processes, and challenges long-standing historiographical assumptions about the fight against smallpox only gathering strength from the mid-1960s onwards, after the start of a US-supported programme in western Africa. The evidence presented here suggests a far more complex picture. It shows that although the SEP's structures grew slowly between 1958 and 1967, a worldwide eradication programme resulted from international negotiations made possible through gains during this period. Significant progress in limiting the incidence of smallpox sustained international collaboration, and justified the prolongation and expansion of activities. Indeed, all of this bore diplomatic and legal processes within the World Health Assembly and WHO that acted as the foundation of the so-called intensified phase of the SEP and the multi-faceted activities that led to the certification of smallpox eradication in 1980.
Highlights
The World Health Assembly (WHA) of May 1980 hosted the celebrations of the worldwide eradication of naturally occurring smallpox
An expansive, worldwide smallpox eradication programme (SEP) was announced by the World Health Assembly in 1958, leading this decision-making body to instruct the World Health Organization Headquarters in Geneva to work with WHO regional offices to engage and draw in national governments to ensure success
Significant progress in limiting the incidence of smallpox sustained international collaboration, and justified the prolongation and expansion of activities. All of this bore diplomatic and legal processes within the World Health Assembly and WHO that acted as the foundation of the so-called intensified phase of the SEP and the multi-faceted activities that led to the certification of smallpox eradication in 1980
Summary
It would be fair to say that existing institutional histories, participant autobiographies and biographies, and academic studies of worldwide smallpox eradication have generally failed to provide us with nuanced assessments of the many organised efforts to improve and widen smallpox surveillance and vaccination work across Latin America and Asia during the 1950s and early 1960s. Hochman reveals how some national representatives took advantage of the new political developments in Latin America, especially the work of Juscelino Kubitschek with the so-called Alliance for Progress, to bring smallpox to the forefront of national health agenda at the outset of the 1960s These impulses would go on to get support from an unexpected source: a military government that came to power after a coup in 1964, which was keen to get international recognition and a national smallpox eradication campaign provided such an opportunity.[22] Sanjoy Bhattacharya’s case studies of independent India assess the complexity of its national and local governments’ engagements with WHO officials seeking to promote the interests of the worldwide SEP in the 1960s and 1970s.
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