eli5: How was smallpox eradicated but other diseases are significantly harder to completely get rid of?

Question

eli5: How was smallpox eradicated but other diseases are significantly harder to completely get rid of?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Much of it is a people problem.

Smallpox was literally just that bad that at the height of the Cold War both the Soviets and Americans worked together on eradicating it.

The human part is that none of the other diseases are as bad so we aren’t as motivated to cooperate. For example: we traded 5-10 years of progress on Polio eradication to get Osama Bin Laden.