Rahima Banu, a three-year-old girl on Bhola Island in Bangladesh, developed a fever on October 16, 1975. A rash followed. Health workers confirmed it was variola minor, a form of smallpox. She survived. Her case was the last known instance of naturally occurring smallpox on Earth.
The World Health Organization had initiated its Intensified Smallpox Eradication Programme in 1967. The strategy was surveillance and containment, not mass vaccination. Workers tracked every case, isolating the infected and vaccinating anyone who might have contacted them. Rahima’s case triggered a frantic containment effort. Health workers vaccinated 18,150 people in the surrounding villages within a two-week period. No further cases emerged from her infection.
Her recovery closed a chapter of human history defined by a virus that killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone. The last death from smallpox occurred two years later in a laboratory accident. In 1980, the WHO declared the disease eradicated. Smallpox remains the only human disease ever deliberately wiped from the planet.
Rahima Banu’s case is a monument to a global cooperative effort, a rare victory of logistics and political will over a microscopic enemy. The virus itself exists now only in two high-security laboratories. Her face, captured in a photograph from her isolation hut, is the last human face of an ancient terror.