Alarming Diseases and their vaccines: Three Diseases almost eradicated - Smallpox, Diphtheria & Polio

 Smallpox was a deadly disease.

It was often fatal, and even if you survived, you were left with scars where the painful elevation of the skin filled with serous fluid used to be.

But rational aggressive eradication campaign, became the first human disease that we totally wiped out, save a few deadly samples kept in labs around the world.

So far, it remains the only one we’ve gotten rid of entirely, but we’re getting nearly close on it, like polio.

And to do that, doctors have had to get creative, and come up with different strategies to tackle to each disease.

Many diseases that are on the verge of elimination are there thanks to the same kind of preventative measures that knocked out smallpox: it's vaccines.

But the smallpox vaccine wasn’t perfect because it involved getting people actually sick with a different but related virus to protect them.

Most various modern vaccines are different, and that’s in part thanks to the creativity that led to the vaccine for the bacterial infection diphtheria.

Surprisingly, simple steps like proper filtering drinking water and keeping people with infections away from waters people use have gotten us to the point where the guinea worm is nearing wiped. The disease gets started when the worm larvae and the tiny water fleas they develop in are ingested, usually through drinking water from still, stagnant ponds. 

New treatment plan received the World Health Organization’s stamp of approval in late 2017, which hopefully will help doctors stay on point to eradicate lymphatic filariasis as a public health problem by 2020. So combine larvae-killing drugs with anti- mosquito efforts like nets and you can stop the disease in its tracks. But thanks to an aggressive eradication campaign, it became the first human disease we totally wiped out, save a few deadly samples kept in labs around the world. 

Globally, hundreds of thousands of cases gone through of diphtheria per year to less than 6,000 in 2020. Some of the last endemic countries like South Sudan are aiming to be completely guinea worm free by 2020. And while smallpox is the only one to earn that title, arguably the next closest is dracunculiasis or Guinea worm disease. For a disease to be completely eradicated, there have to be literally zero cases of it in the entire world. The diphtheria bacteria produces a toxin which can break down tissues in the lungs and throat, forming a slimy grey mess called a pseudomembrane. But between 2000 and 2020, nearly seven billion treatments were given out, which have likely prevented or cured almost 100 million cases.