Smallpox eradicated

There used to be a radio news commentator in America in the old days, before Elmer Davis and Raymond Swing and Ed Murrow, at a time when news commentators were practically indistinguishable from circus barkers, and this smooth and unfailingly superficial baritone used to start his more cheerful commentaries with the phrase, 'There's good news tonight.' And he would then pass on the exciting word that a baby in West Virginia had been rescued from a pond or maybe that Hitler had announced his admiration of the British Empire.

At the time, my father-in-law who was an epidemiologist – a public health expert of awesome reputation, he'd been in charge of the American expeditionary forces in the First War – he was fighting a senator from New York who had close links with the powerful lobby of the pharmaceutical houses, the people who make your pills and drugs. This senator could always be depended on to oppose any extension of the Pure Food and Drug law and just then he was opposing a law, which I'm glad to say my father-in-law eventually got through, which required, and requires, the printing of the chemical ingredients on the labels of all drugs and prepared foods. Let's call the senator, Senator Elmer Puffin. 

Well, one fine summer day I arrived at the end of Long Island and found my father-in-law pruning trees on his farm. He was the dourest Puritan I've ever met. His winning smile was as rare as a falling star. He never, in my recollection, ever grinned, but on this day he was grinning like a stand-up comic and he actually waved at me from a long way off. I went across a field to see what this extraordinary mania was all about and he put his arm round my shoulder. 'My boy,' he said, 'there's good news tonight. Elmer Puffin is dead.' 

Well, by an obvious association I'm here to tell you there's good news tonight. Smallpox is dead everywhere in the world. The natural thing is to say how can they possibly know about the darkest jungles of Brazil, the wastes of Africa, the far reaches of the Soviet Union, which has not been in the habit of giving out anything embarrassing from the accidental death of an astronaut to a case of smallpox? And remember it took the Chinese eight months to admit that that appalling earthquake of – when was it? – early last year, I think, had killed about a million people. 

Well they do know. Thanks to an organisation that most people know very little about and yet it is one of, if not THE, most splendid thing to come out of the United Nations, namely its World Health Organisation – WHO. There's never been anything like it before. Its headquarters are in Geneva. It never sleeps, around the clock there is a watchdog staff looking at its own worldwide ticker service, consulting huge maps, sticking in flags and tracking the winking of little lights that record the fact that some farmer in the Caucasus has a suspicious rash or that one passenger flying from Singapore to Hong Kong got off the plane and was held for a suspected case of beriberi. 

But now, smallpox. The head of the world organisation, one Dr Halfdan Mahler, called a press conference last Tuesday at the UN headquarters in New York. It must've been a proud day for him. He told how smallpox had been hunted all around the globe and how, finally, the last cases were tracked down in Bangladesh. It took 12,000 Bangladesh health workers and a supervising team of one hundred from the staff of the World Health Organisation to spend two years making house-to-house calls and searches. They found no other case than that of a three-year-old girl who went down with smallpox in October 1975. They've found no other cases anywhere since. 

I ought to say, by way of anticipating certain knowing people, that there is a very much milder form of the disease that still exists but only it exists still on the Horn of Africa. The thing anybody over 30 or so must have been taught to dread, Variola major, which scoured Dr Johnson and George Washington and generations down to many obscure people we all knew only a few years ago, has vanished. 

It was done by applying technological methods to the smallpox vaccination discovered two centuries ago by Edward Jenner. The World Health Organisation started ten years ago to scan the world for smallpox and, the other day, the man who started this campaign and conducted it for many years, said, 'If anyone put up a million dollars as the price for being shown a case of smallpox, we couldn't accept his one million.' I find this unreal to believe when I recall that only, I think, three, four years ago, the United States required to seek proof of a recent vaccination from everybody – citizens, non citizens, immigrants, holiday makers arriving at any American port or airport. 

Well, maybe I've gone on a little about this marvellous release because we do get to take for granted, in no time, the really successful revolutions that have nothing to do with politics, I suppose most young people under 30 assume that tuberculosis is a barbarous plague that flourished like the Black Death in the benighted nineteenth century, especially afflicting talented poets in garrets and glamorous sinners like Camille. But I myself have known at least half a dozen close friends and relations who died of it and I have one friend who got it three years ago. He never stopped work or went away in isolation because he was treated by something that 30 years ago would have been ridiculed as a possibility – a pill – or what Americans now universally call chemotherapy. 

So having given two cheers for the United Nations, let's try and see how the people are doing whose whole life and work are devoted to improving things. I mean the politicians. Year after year, decade after decade, election after election, they promise an end to poverty and suffering and injustice and yet how very rarely can they claim anything like such a triumph as the conquest of tuberculosis or smallpox. And how rare, still, it is for one political party or system to say about another party or system, 'They promised and they delivered'. 

We seem now to be at a stage, in the United States anyway, when the two great political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, which really ought to be renamed the 'liberals' and the 'conservatives', when the two parties are suffering from profound doubts about what used to be their fundamental creeds. I don’t believe there's one responsible Republican who's prepared to say, as the Republican gods all parroted in the 1920s, that the only way to prosperity is through a free enterprise system with no government control or planning. And what is more surprising still, there are fewer and fewer Democrats who believe that everything is best solved by more and more federal control and more and more money from Washington. 

Last week yet another study came out of the shambles of the present welfare system which President Carter has sworn to reform. Unbelievable figures on the exploitation, not to say the appropriation, of welfare funds by the local officials who were supposed to be distributing it fairly to the needy, junkets abroad, the transfer of welfare benefits from one part of a city to another. In some places most of the welfare funds were being used for committee meetings or printed studies on how to spend the money. The use of cripples and babies as portable propaganda being shifted from house to house when the inspector came. Not to mention the siphoning-off of welfare funds to drug pushers, crooked politicians, crooked doctors and well-disguised agents of the Mafia. 

You can say, of course, that the abuse of a system is no argument against its merit but any system is only as good as it's workable and once money comes pouring into the states from Washington, the sheer size of the country and the complexity of local politics make it impossible to keep honest tabs on it. And yet... and yet, President Carter, looking over the whole complicated mess, says the system is too difficult to replace as soon as he'd hoped. 

A sharp, woman commentator, Meg Greenfield, has put her finger on Mr Carter's problem – which, I might say, is the problem of the centipede wondering which leg to put forward first – by saying, 'The question is will the Democrats let a Democratic president pursue a domestic policy that's different from plain old "more is better" liberalism?' And the answer seems to be, 'No!' 

To put Mr Carter's ordeal very simply, say this. Mr Carter is constantly told that he was elected by the great, varied pressure groups of the Democrats, labour, racial minorities, social welfare bureaucracies, the education lobby and the ideological liberals. These people all believe in old Rooseveltian remedies, spend and spend and soak the rich. 

Yet Mr Carter knows from unquestionable surveys that the voters who really swung his election were the unorganised millions of Democrats who have come to believe that big government and massive federal spending have failed and cannot meet the problems of the 1970s. So he finds himself loathe to forego the old rhetoric, but he knows it's not working, and this leaves him saying, in effect, ‘I do believe the federal government should move in and take hold but I'm sorry to say the money isn't there.' And this means he's alienating both blocks of his own party. He would sound crueller than any Republican if he said he was going to cut down on social services. 

At the same time, the government now has an annual deficit beyond its wildest nightmares of a few years ago – $60 billion in the red. In a word, the president is caught between his old ideology and his new recognition of the painful facts of life. 

In the New Year, if he's not to see his legislative plans totally stalled, he will surely need to be born yet again.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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