CDC WEBSITE: Shapona, the Yoruba god of smallpox https://www.cdc.gov/museum/history/shapona.html Shapona, the Yoruba god of smallpox This is a statue of Shapona, the West African God of Smallpox. This is a statue of Shapona, the West African God of Smallpox. Gift of Rafe and Ilze Henderson, 1995.014, CDCM Collection Perhaps the most iconic object in the David J. Sencer CDC Museum is Shapona, the Yoruba god of smallpox. It represents the international effort to eradicate smallpox in the 1960s and 1970s. One of four in the CDC Museum collection, this Shapona is on display. The figure was commissioned along with several others in 1969 from a fetisheur from Abeokuta (near Lagos) shortly before the May Inter-regional Seminar on Smallpox Eradication held in Lagos. It is a unique carved wooden figure upon which are layered meaningful objects such as monkey skulls, cowrie shells, and fur. Yoruba legend held that the supreme god delegated authority over various kingdoms of the world to his two sons. To his second born son, Shango, he gave control of the sky ; but to his eldest, Shapona, he gave control of the earth, who nourished man by giving him all the grains of the earth, but when he punished, he caused those grains men had eaten to come out on their skins (Challenor 1971, 57-59). Thus, smallpox was an indication of divine displeasure. Formal worship of Shapona was highly controlled by specific priests in charge of shrines to the god. People believed that if angered, the priests were believed capable of causing smallpox outbreaks themselves. Although the British colonial rulers banned the worship of Shapona in 1907 because they suspected the priests of deliberately spreading smallpox, the god continued to be worshipped. In the 1960s and 1970s, WHO and CDC vaccination teams in Dahomey, Togo, and western Nigeria encountered some cultural resistance from Shapona worshippers who thought they were being asked to make war on one of their own deities. Ultimately, these cultural challenges were met and overcome in this part of Africa as well as other parts of the world. Don Millar, Director of the Smallpox Eradication Program, wrote in a 1969 memo to Smallpox Eradication Program personnel, “Immediately after Christmas, George Lythcott came in for two days of consultation, bearing with him a gift of great import from Rafe and Ilze Henderson – an authentic Soponna [sic] fetish of the Babaligbo cult of Aebokuta, Western Nigeria. Rafe’s comment which accompanied the fetish, ‘In hopes this will soon be a relic of the past’.” Eleven years later, in 1980, the World Health Organization officially declared smallpox eradicated. https://www.cdc.gov/about/history/index.html Our History - Our Story On July 1, 1946 the Communicable Disease Center (CDC) opened its doors and occupied one floor of a small building in Atlanta. Its primary mission was simple yet highly challenging: prevent malaria from spreading across the nation. Armed with a budget of only $10 million and fewer than 400 employees, the agency’s early challenges included obtaining enough trucks, sprayers, and shovels necessary to wage war on mosquitoes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_for_Disease_Control_and_Prevention As of 2013, the CDC's Biosafety Level 4 laboratories are among the few that exist in the world,[19] and serve as one of only two official repositories of smallpox in the world. The second smallpox store resides at the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR in the Russian Federation. The CDC revealed in 2014 that it had discovered several misplaced smallpox samples and also that lab workers had potentially been infected with anthrax.[20]