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Photo Gallery: Smallpox

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A farmer in Niger who may have been one of the world's last smallpox victims receives treatment for guinea worm disease. An effective treatment for smallpox was never developed. But in parts of Asia, people employed a technique called variolation to prevent infection. Developed in India more than a thousand years ago, scabs from a victim were ground up and snorted through the nose. This usually brought on a mild form of the disease and immunized the person to future infection. Photograph by Karen Kasmauski