Pandemic smallpox was responsible for 300–500 million deaths. As recently as the early 1950s, an estimated 50 million cases of smallpox occurred in the world each year. After successful vaccination campaigns throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the WHO certified the eradication of smallpox in December 1979. To this day, smallpox is the only human infectious disease to have been completely eradicated, and one of two infectious viruses ever to be eradicated. Historically, measles was prevalent throughout the world, as it is highly contagious. According to the U.S. National Immunization Program, 90% of people were infected with measles by age 15.
Quaternary extinction event not account for several major extinction events, notably Australia and North America. Dogs did not arrive in Australia until approximately 35,000 years after the first humans arrived and approximately 30,000 years after the megafaunal extinction was complete and as such can not be implicated. In contrast numerous species including wolves, mammoths, camelids and horses had emigrated continually between Asia and North America over the past 100,000 years. For the disease hypothesis to be applicable in the case of the Americas it would require that the population remain immunologically naive despite this constant transmission of genetic and pathogenic material. The Second-Order