On October 26, 1977, Ali Maow Maalin contracted smallpox in Merca, Somalia — the last naturally occurring case of smallpox in the world. The global eradication campaign that produced this outcome had been coordinated by the World Health Organization from Geneva; the field epidemiology that drove it included the work of Ciro de Quadros, D.A. Henderson, and a team of researchers who tracked every outbreak, quarantined every contact, and vaccinated outward until the chain of transmission was broken.

Among them was Nicole Grasset, a Swiss physician who led the WHO's smallpox eradication program in South Asia from 1969 to 1975. She coordinated vaccination campaigns across Bangladesh, India, and Nepal — the most densely populated region of the remaining smallpox endemic zone. Her operational records are in the WHO archive.

A more documented case from the same campaign: Ruth Levine, an economist who later analyzed the economics of vaccination programs, has noted that the epidemiologists who did the field work in the 1970s were frequently women who found positions in international public health because academic medicine was less accessible to them. The eradication campaign was staffed substantially by women whose names are not in the standard narrative.

The smallpox eradication is described in most accounts as a WHO program managed by D.A. Henderson. It was also built by hundreds of field workers, many of them women, whose names are in the field reports and not in the histories.