THE smallpox virus, which has killed millions over the centuries, finally faces extinction.
Today, 20 years after the disease was eradicated, the World Health Assembly meets to decide if it should finally destroy the last remaining stocks of the deadly virus, held at high security labs in the United States and Russia.
The story of smallpox, leading to today's historic meeting, is a series of medical milestones. The first, 200 years ago this month was when Edward Jenner, building on techniques used for centuries in Turkey, devised a safer vaccine.
Jenner's, and later Pasteur's work, helped to control the disease but smallpox was still a scourge and 1,500 people died in Dublin alone during the 1878 epidemic.
Although the last major outbreak in Ireland was in 1903, when there were 256 cases in Dublin, the disease was still widespread elsewhere and as late as the 1960s it was claiming two million lives a year and leaving millions more disfigured or blind.
By then, WHO had embarked on an ambitious vaccination programme to eradicate it. Ten years and $300 million later, the "speckled monster" was finally conquered. The last natural ease was in Somalia in 1977.
In May 1980 the World Health Organisation officially declared smallpox the first disease to have been deliberately eradicated. It was a major achievement in public health, and one that puts the organisation in the unusual position of having to consider whether the virus should now be finally destroyed.
But the story does not there. Tragically, in 1978, an English photographer died when she became infected when small pox leaked from a research laboratory in Birmingham, where it was being studied. Filled with remorse, the lab director committed suicide.
The case is often used as a potent argument for the dangers of working with deadly diseases.
Some scientists argue that, further research is needed, that We do not yet know enough about smallpox, that we will need to know more in case some new, related disease emerge.
But the growing scientific consensus favours destroying the last stocks, currently held in freezers in the US and Russia. The health risks, the security risks and the costs are all too much, they say.
The WHO agrees, and in January, its executive board recommended destruction. Whether its assembly will accede today remains to be seen, for the issue has been discussed before without any decision.
If agreement is reached, the viral stocks will be destroyed in 1999 but even then WHO will maintain 500,000 vaccine doses and stocks of the special strain of the smallpox virus from which the vaccine is made.
Deciding to deliberately destroy an endangered species is not a decision that will be taken lightly but there are few who will mourn the passing of this disease.