Marka (Merca), Somalia

city · earth

A coastal town in Lower Shabelle, Somalia, some seventy kilometres south-west of Mogadishu, and the place where the last naturally acquired case of smallpox in the world began. Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook and part-time vaccinator, developed a rash of variola minor with onset recorded on 26 October 1977; he recovered. The last natural case of the more lethal variola major had been Rahima Banu, a child in Bangladesh, in October 1975. One further death followed in 1978 — Janet Parker, a medical photographer in Birmingham, England, infected in a laboratory accident — which is why the certification process ran for two more years after Marka. Maalin later worked on polio eradication in Somalia and died of malaria in 2013.