The one that ended
One human disease was hunted until it stopped. It is not one of the infections this counter is ticking through.
This counter is a group, rounded to 8 million deaths a year. Pneumonia and the other infections of the lung. Diarrhoea. Tuberculosis. Malaria. HIV. They are not one disease, and they are not a finished chapter. One human disease is finished. It is not on the list above.
The last case in the wild
Smallpox killed for centuries and then stopped. The World Health Organization's intensified campaign began in 1967. The last person known to have caught it in the ordinary way was Ali Maow Maalin, a cook at the hospital in Merca, Somalia. On 12 October 1977, he rode in a vehicle with two children who had smallpox, taking them from the hospital to the smallpox office. On 22 October, he developed a fever. Staff diagnosed malaria, then chickenpox. On 30 October, the eradication team diagnosed smallpox. He was isolated. He recovered. Nobody he had been in contact with came down with it.
He had the milder form of the virus. The last person to die of smallpox caught person-to-person was a child from the outbreak he had been exposed to, a six-year-old girl named Habiba Nur Ali. Maalin lived. In April 1978, a WHO office sent word that the search was finished and that he was the last known case in the world.
The last death
He was the last natural case. He was not the last death. In August 1978, Janet Parker, a medical photographer at the University of Birmingham, in England, became ill. She worked one floor above a laboratory that kept smallpox. She died on 11 September 1978, the last person recorded to have died of the disease. Her mother caught it from her. An inquiry thought the virus had travelled through a service duct. The university was later prosecuted and acquitted, and the exact route was never settled. A disease can be gone from the wild and still be in a freezer, or in a room above a freezer.
The World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated on 8 May 1980. It remains the only human disease to have been declared gone. People had been using a related, milder infection as protection since the eighteenth century. Eradication was a different job: finding every case, and vaccinating around it, until there were no cases left to find.
What the counter still counts
Maalin spent later years vaccinating children against polio. He died of malaria on 22 July 2013, while doing that work. Polio is the obvious comparison, and it is not a second smallpox. As of 2026, wild polio still circulates in Afghanistan and Pakistan. WHO still treats the two countries as one pool of infection, with the virus moving across the border.
The rest of this card is further still from a closing date. Tuberculosis, malaria, HIV, pneumonia and diarrhoea have all fallen in many places since 2000. They still fill the 8 million, and in poorer countries they are still leading causes of death. What actually kills people is the longer account of that retreat, and of why it is so much further along in some places than others. A ticker that says “infectious pathogens” is mostly those, not the disease that actually ended.
This is not health advice. It is a story about a population statistic. It says nothing about any one person's risk. If you have concerns about your health, speak to a doctor.
Sources
- CDC, history of smallpox, including Ali Maow Maalin and Janet Parker.
- WHO on smallpox, and the declaration of eradication of 8 May 1980.
- WHO polio emergency committee, 25 August 2026, on wild polio still circulating in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
- The annual figure used on the counter is the Ledger's own rounding, set out on the methodology page.