17 Jan Disease eradication: where are we at now?
Posted at 15:44h
in News
Thirty years on, smallpox remains the only human disease to have been eradicated, despite relentless efforts to get rid of others.
In the late 1980s, guinea worm eradication was scheduled for 1995 and polio for 2000 — but they are still with us. And efforts to eradicate malaria dating back to 1955 had similarly failed by the 1960s when researchers realised that mosquitoes were developing resistance to DDT, the environmentally-hazardous pesticide.