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Book Review


Nature Medicine 15, 1121 (2009)
doi:10.1038/nm1009-1121

Smallpox outfoxed

Ellen G Strauss1

  1. Ellen G. Strauss is Senior Research Associate Emeritus at the Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA.

Correspondence to: Ellen G Strauss1 e-mail: strausse@caltech.edu

The global eradication of smallpox has been rightly called the "greatest life-saving achievement in the history of medicine," as pointed out by Richard Preston in the foreword to the new book Smallpox—The Death of a Disease: The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer. This personal account of the eradication effort, written by its director Donald A.