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Dr. Donald A. Henderson, a leader of one of mankind’s greatest public health triumphs, the eradication of smallpox, died on Friday in Towson, Md. He was 87.

died in a hospice of complications of a hip fracture, including infection with antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus, a dangerous pathogen he had himself researched and raised alarms about

The last known case was found in a hospital cook in Somalia in 1977.

Although the report supported getting flu shots, it said that new vaccines offering lifelong protection against all flu strains, instead of annual partial protection against a mix-and-match set, must be created.

“Vaccine effectiveness” is a very different metric from vaccine-virus match, which is done in a lab. Vaccine efficacy is measured by interviewing hundreds of sick or recovering patients who had positive flu tests and asking whether and when they had received shots.

During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, many elderly Americans had natural protection, presumably from flus they caught in the 1930s or ’40s.

HPV infection is the most common sexually transmitted disease — between 75 percent and 80 percent of females and males in the United States will be infected at some point in their lives. Most will overcome the infection with no ill effects. But in some people, infections lead to cellular changes that cause warts or cancer, including cervical, vaginal and vulvar cancers in women and anal cancers in men and women. A growing body of evidence suggests that HPV also causes throat cancers in men and women as a result of oral sex. HPV infections cause about 15,000 cancers in women and 7,000 cancers in men each year. And while cervical cancer rates have plunged over the past four decades because of widespread screening, anal cancer rates in men and women have been increasing. Head and neck cancers have also been increasing, with the share associated with HPV infection increasing rapidly — perhaps because oral sex has increased in popularity.

And in future generations, those genes will gradually mutate and lose their ability to make new viruses. Eventually, the koala retrovirus will become extinct. All that will remain will be its imprisoned DNA.

In many koalas, the virus’ genes aren’t present just in the immune cells. The koalas carry the virus genes in every cell of their bodies, from their vestigial tails to their snub noses and in every organ in between

Koalas had long been known to have terrible health

“I say, ‘Use this vaccine,’ ” he said. “The safety profile is actually quite good. But we have oversold it. Use it — but just know it’s not going to work nearly as well as everyone says.”

“Not having evidence doesn’t prove it doesn’t work; we just don’t know,” said Dr. Roger Thomas, a Cochrane Collaboration coordinator for the University of Calgary in Alberta, who was an author of both of the reviews. “The intelligent decision would be to have large, publicly funded independent trials.”

“Does it work as well as the measles vaccine? No, and it’s not likely to. But the vaccine works,” Dr. Joseph Bresee, chief of epidemiology and prevention in the C.D.C.’s influenza division, said. And research is advancing to improve the effectiveness of the vaccine.

It's important to note that the T-cells are removed from the patient before being bioengineered with the HIV virus

therapies that involve the reprogramming of a patient’s immune system, may also eventually be used to fight cancerous breast and prostate tumors.

Within a month, health authorities in 14 countries had identified more than 1,300 cases of respiratory illness that all traced back to those brief encounters somewhere in the hotel. Within five months, the illness — dubbed SARS, for severe acute respiratory syndrome — had caused 8,098 illnesses, and 774 deaths in 26 countries around the world.