Smallpox...

Will you check something for me, please?

And smallpox But you're not scarred.

Our mushroom strains were in the highly active range.

Weaponized smallpox!

And that prediction came true.

22 smallpox cases so far.

Audience Early detection, early response.

And so my TED wish is based on the common denominator of these experiences.

I am immune to smallpox.

This is what happened. Now I start the world.

So those are the kind of stakes that we're after.

It wasn't just India that had smallpox deities smallpox deities were prevalent all over the world.

And why is it true?

1974, we were down to five countries.

So too do deaths from pneumonia and smallpox.

(Video) Jon Stewart Where is polio still active?

No incentive to report smallpox.

Never can you doubt that we are all in this together.

In the year that Larry Page and Sergey Brin with whom I have a certain affection and a new affiliation in the year in which they were born, two million people died of smallpox.

Everybody is immune to smallpox nowadays.

And by day 20, while he will be scarred for life, he will live.

And as we did that, the number of reported cases in the world dropped to zero.

But in that year, smallpox exploded throughout India.

When you read the biblical plague of boils, that was smallpox.

I'm the luckiest guy in the world.

He's still in north Texas trying to put a stop to that smallpox outbreak...

It wouldn't do just to vaccinate everyone.

It's not ancient history.

And we had to start all over again.

When we had almost eradicated smallpox, it came back again, because the company town of Tatanagar drew laborers, who could come there and get employment.

They point to the successes of aid the eradication of smallpox, and the distribution of tens of millions of malaria bed nets and antiretrovirals.

Because you're a virologist, and smallpox is one of your areas of expertise.

So you can't see the enemy most of the time, and as a result, we've needed a very different approach to eradicate polio than what was done with smallpox.

We have three different strains of Agarikon mushrooms that were highly active against poxviruses.

Smallpox killed billions of people on this planet.

And a few years ago, we received these results.

There are 20 million people on the road at any time, in buses and trains, walking 500,000 villages, 120 million households, and none of them wanted to report if they had a case of smallpox in their house, because they thought that smallpox was the visitation of a deity,

Mohamed ElBaradei, and the tremendous hope and optimism that he brought all of us, and our own Muhammad Yunus.

A surveillance system was necessary, because what we needed was early detection, early response.

Enhanced Native

In 1967, the WHO embarked on what was an outrageous program to eradicate a disease.

The first is that, when we started trying to eradicate polio about 20 years ago, more than twice as many countries were infected than had been when we started off with smallpox.

And people immediately freak out about things about Ebola or smallpox, but the DNA from this organism is not infective.

Love is blind.