History of smallpox centuries, the WHO certified the global eradication of smallpox in December 1979. Smallpox is one of two infectious diseases to have been eradicated, the other being rinderpest, which was declared eradicated in 2011. It has been suggested that smallpox was a major component of the Plague of Athens that occurred in 430 BCE, during the Peloponnesian Wars, and was described by Thucydides. Galen's description of the Antonine Plague, which swept through the Roman Empire in 165–180, indicates that it was probably caused by smallpox. Returning soldiers brought the disease home with them to Syria and Italy, where it raged for
Human extinction to trigger a different mode of thinking... People who would never dream of hurting a child hear of an existential risk, and say, "Well, maybe the human species doesn't really deserve to survive". All past predictions of human extinction have proven to be false. To some, this makes future warnings seem less credible. Nick Bostrom argues that the lack of human extinction in the past is weak evidence that there will be no human extinction in the future, due to survivor bias and other anthropic effects. Some behavioural finance scholars claim that recent evidence is given undue significance in risk