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TED Prize winner Larry Brilliant is an epidemiologist who presided over the last case of SmallPox on the planet.

Accepting his 2006 TED Prize, Dr. Larry Brilliant talks about how smallpox was finally eradicated from the planet. In a conversational style that belies the deadly seriousness of his subject, he describes the dangers of pandemic disease, and offers a solution in his dramatic TED Prize wish, a plan to use the Internet to help prevent the next pandemic.

I’m the luckiest guy in the world. I got to see the last case of killer Small Pox in the world. I was in India this past year and I may have seen the last cases of Polio in the world. There’s nothing that makes you feel more the blessing and the honor of working in a program like that than to know that something that horrible no longer exists. So I’m going…. (spontaneous applause from the audience)…. So I’m going to show you some dirty pictures. They are difficult to watch, but you should look at them with optimism. Because the horror of these pictures will be matched by the uplifting quality of knowing that they no longer exist. But first, I’m going to tell you a little bit about my own journey…

[Watch the embedded YouTube video by clicking the play button. It's about 26 minutes long. Well worth your time. In case the video doesn't play, you can watch the original at the TED site or download it to your desktop or iTunes.]

Larry Brilliant also founded the Seva Foundation, which works to reverse cases of blindness, and co-founded several technology start-ups, including the legendary online community, The Well. He was recently named Executive Director of the Google Foundation.
He also talks about GPHIN, the Global Public Health Intelligence Network:

GPHIN is a secure, Internet-based “early warning” system that gathers preliminary reports of public health significance in seven languages on a real-time, 24/7 basis.

This unique, multilingual system gathers and disseminates relevant information on disease outbreaks and other public health events by monitoring global media sources such as news wires and web sites. The information is filtered for relevancy by an automated process, and then analyzed by Public Health Agency of Canada GPHIN officials. The output is categorized and made accessible to users. Notifications about public health events that may have serious public health consequences are immediately forwarded to users.