World Health Organization contain the last European outbreak in Yugoslavia in 1972. After over two decades of fighting smallpox, the WHO declared in 1979 that the disease had been eradicated – the first disease in history to be eliminated by human effort. Also in 1967, the WHO launched the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases and the World Health Assembly voted to enact a resolution on Disability Prevention and Rehabilitation, with a focus on community-driven care. In 1974, the Expanded Programme on Immunization and the control programme of onchocerciasis was started, an important partnership between the Food and Agriculture Organization
Human genetic resistance to malaria fetal hemoglobin (HbF) confer some protection against falciparum malaria in adults with Hereditary persistence of fetal hemoglobin. Evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane was the first to give a hypothesis on the relationship between malaria and the genetic disease. He first delivered his hypothesis at the Eighth International Congress of Genetics held in 1948 at Stockholm on a topic "The Rate of Mutation of Human Genes". He formalised in a technical paper published in 1949 in which he made a prophetic statement: "The corpuscles of the anaemic heterozygotes are smaller than normal, and more resistant to hypotonic solutions. It is at least