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Smallpox and somalia!!

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IsseGole:
It is very common when they talk about eradication of diseases to mention that the only eradicated disease is the Smallpox, and yet they mention that the last case on earth was that of Ali Maow Maalin.
Ali Maow Maalin was the last person in the world known to be infected with naturally occurring smallpox. At age 23, Maalin was a cook at the hospital in the town of Merca, Somalia, as well as an occasional vaccinator for a World Health Organization smallpox eradication team. In October 1977, he went out to meet two children with smallpox symptoms being brought in from an outlying village. On 26 October 1977, he was diagnosed with an infection of the Variola minor strain of smallpox. Maalin had previously received the smallpox vaccine but was apparently in the small percentage of people for whom the vaccination does not take. He subsequently recovered.
It is also wide known that the WHO made a enormously huge money for who brings a case of smallpox, and still no one ever did.
The second disease to eradicate is the Polio, and somalia was one of the countries who were very close to pronounce that it was eradicated, but cases has started again to show up like many other countries in the EMRO-region.
We hope all disease become stories to tell, and we become free from them, that is just a hope although it is very far from where we are standing today.
Ciise Dheere.

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