| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
When Dr. Viktor M. Zhdanov, Deputy Minister of Health of the Soviet Union, arrived in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 1958 to attend the annual meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA), the governing body of the World Health Organization (WHO), the visit was not routine.1 Reflecting Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev's new policy of "peaceful coexistence" with the West, it marked the first time that a Soviet delegation had been sent to that forum since the establishment of the WHO ten years earlier.2 And Zhdanov made his mark, calling on the organization to launch a global campaign to eradicate smallpox, one of humankind's oldest and deadliest diseases. Mindful of the meeting's venue, he began his call with a quote from a letter that U.S. president Thomas Jefferson had written to Edward Jenner, discoverer of the smallpox vaccine, more than a century and a half earlier. The discovery, Jefferson had written the English physician in 1806, would ensure that "future nations will know by history only that the loathsome small-pox has existed.
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