To apply the surveillance and containment strategy, it was necessary to know where the smallpox virus was, which villages had active cases of smallpox. The struggle against smallpox could not be won without knowing where the enemy was and what it was doing. But India did not have accurate surveillance data. Many villages with active cases had not been reported.

While Guinea worm was widespread in Nigeria and Ghana, the leaders thought Guinea worm impacted only a small number of people and for this reason they were not motivated to do anything to solve the problem. But what government leaders thought were a few hundred cases turned out to be over 650,000 cases.

People were looking for something to blame for an increase in gun violence and they focused on violent video games, movies, and music that seems to extol violence. But people did not really know which factors were causally associated with violent behaviors.