Just five years after he had performed the first successful vaccination, in 1796, Edward Jenner felt confident enough in the new technique to proclaim: annihilation of the smallpox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the result of this practice. This year his prophetic wish may finally come true. Armed with the sophisticated methods of epidemiology and a modern, freeze-dried version of Jenner's vaccine, the World Health Organization is mounting an all-out campaign against the disease in the last three countries where it remains endemic: Ethiopia, India and Bangladesh. In an interview with SCIENCE NEWS at WHO headquarters in Geneva, John S. Copland, administrative officer for the Smallpox Eradication Unit, outlined the plan. Originally, public health officials had hoped that if more than 80 percent of a population could be vaccinated, smallpox would decline more or less automatically. But in countries like India with relatively large, isolated groups spread over vast areas, the remaining unvaccinated persons served as a potent source for reinfestation. Any attempt to vaccinate 100 percent of such a population would be prohibitively expensive, so WHO officials chose an epidemiological approach, what Copland whimsically calls 'The Bank Robber Theory'-go where the money is. Finding where the payoff is, in this case, involves discovering new outbreaks of smallpox before it has a chance to spread, and cutting off transmission by selective vaccination. First, the victims' families are vaccinated, then their neighbors, then their village . . .until no more cases appear after a period of weeks. To encourage local help, rewards are offered to the first person in an area who reports an undiscovered outbreak to authorities. In India, rewards now run about 50 to 100 rupeesmore than a month's income for many poor villagers-and when an area has been declared free of the disease, even larger rewards are offered, to prevent reinfestation. Reintroduction usuall) results from travel between infected and noninfected areas. Between 1961 and 1973, smallpox was reintroduced into Europe on 29 separate occasions-resulting in 568 documented cases. Air travel complicates the problem, since complete journeys may take place during the incubation period (one to three weeks). Nomadic groups have also been major spreaders of the disease, and in the bandit-ridden mountains of Afghanistan and adjacent areas, outbreaks among smugglers have proved particularly difficult to trace and stamp out. Another, unique obstacle to final eradication of smallpox is the ancient folk practice of variolation-inoculation with the active variola (smallpox) virus by itinerant medicine men. These untrained peddlers collect pox scabs from victims of the disease and carry them about the countryside in little cases, ready for application to cuts in the skin of persons who have never been infected. The result, of course, is a full-blown case of smallpox, but for some reason these induced cases are less frequently fatal and often do not lead to as much disfigurement. The practice was common in Europe during Jenner's time and prob-