J. Michael Lane, leader in Smallpox eradication, Dies at 84

[BillTre]

NY Times obit here.
J. Michael Lane, the last director of the C.D.C.’s smallpox eradication bureau, lead a 13 year campaign to eradicate small pox which achieved success in 1977.
The WHO (not the band) declared small pox dead (in the wild) in 1980.

In his years of writing and lecturing on smallpox, Dr. Lane drew a vivid portrait of that unseen enemy, one of humanity’s oldest and most terrifying infectious diseases. Perhaps emerging from a rodent virus 10,000 years ago, it periodically swept around the world over the centuries, killing or blinding a third of its victims: hundreds of millions in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, 80 percent of the Native Americans who caught it from European invaders, and the multitudes and monarchs of many lands.

Its traces were found in the 3,000-year-old mummy of Pharaoh Ramses V of Egypt. Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln survived it. And in the 20th century it was blamed for 300 million deaths before it was finally wiped out in an international campaign led by public health officials in the United States and the Soviet Union.

“I worked with Mike for a half-century,” Dr. Foege recalled for this obituary. “He was extremely important to the success of the smallpox eradication program. He worked in many countries, and ran the whole program from Atlanta. He figured out the complications of administering the vaccine. And he was a great teacher.”

 

[BillTre]

Things like this are hard work and a great gift to the world.

 

[Astronuc]

He was a giant like Albert Bruce Sabin, a Polish-American medical researcher, best known for developing the oral polio vaccine, which has played a key role in nearly eradicating the disease, and Jonas Edward Salk, an American virologist and medical researcher who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines.

I got my small pox vaccine in 1964, probably at the beginning of the school year.