Published on 04 June 2013
By Larissa Tuohy, Communications Manager, ChildFund Australia
In 1970, as a young infant about to travel to the United States, I was given the smallpox vaccine. While Australia had been largely free of this disease since the early 1900s, there still remained a risk, although minor, of contracting the infection in America. It would not be until 1980 that the World Health Organisation would officially declare that smallpox had been eradicated worldwide...