Yards and yards of clear plastic sheeting line the cellar floor, dwarfing the corpse: headless, frail, supine. The young bony arms — covered in fine black powder from centuries of immobility in the frozen tundra — are crossed at rest, reminiscent of a ceremonial burial. Camera flashes illuminate the scene. Several dozen scientists stand around the body, murmuring in Russian and English about the find of the day. How long do you think it was buried? Do you think it's male or female? How did they get it back to camp? And the pervasive thought: I don't think we should touch it. He could have died of smallpox. Smallpox was a vicious disease before its eradication in the 1970s, but the virus is hardy and can survive long-term storage. One such storage unit is the tundra of the high northern latitudes that preserves an unknown number of bodies that could have died from smallpox. Global warming is now rapidly thawing this freezer, increasing the chance that someone could come into contact with a smallpox-infested body, thereby reintroducing the disease. Smallpox rivals malaria as the most deadly infectious disease ever to affect humans. Throughout history, people looked for ways to combat the disease, priming their immune systems with remedies such as sniffing ground-up scabs or smearing pus into open wounds. The first true vaccine — developed in 1796 by Edward Jenner — was for smallpox. The variola virus responsible for smallpox, which causes fever, fatigue and pustules that leave deep scars on the skin, decimated the Americas after Columbus landed in the West Indies. The disease similarly ravaged the people of the Arctic, and an estimated 300 million people died from smallpox in the 20th century alone before the World Health Organization's vaccination campaign was completely effective.

The last case from natural exposure was in the late 1970s in Ethiopia. Today smallpox exists only in highly secure U.S. and Russian laboratories. According to Jonathan Tucker, a senior fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, "the greatest risk of smallpox infection today is from the continued scientific research with the live virus, as well as from the hypothetical existence of undeclared stocks of the virus that could pose a risk of accidental or deliberate release.

View: Full Article | Source: Live Science

small pox is cool i did a whole assignment on it back at school

Smallpox is NOT cool . It is a horrible disease.

Let's hope it doesn't come back

I suppose the deaths might be sad, but in my opinion diseases are incredibly "cool". I find it amusing when people are so terrified of spiders and silly things like height. Spiders and height don't indiscriminately decimate populations.

I thought it was still around in parts of the third world maybe im wrong there were cases reported in the 70s

yeah something 100 times smaller then the full stop at the end of this sentence could easily bring down the entire human race. Viruses and such are cool and ruthless killers what scares me the most is biological warfare

if it got loose again , we'd be up that creek without a paddle. no country has enough vaccine in case of outbreak. they could contain a small one , but with travel what it is today ???

[edit] Post-eradication
The last cases of smallpox on Earth occurred in an outbreak of 2 cases (one of which was fatal) in Birmingham, England in 1978. A medical photographer, Janet Parker, died from the disease on 11 September 1978,[38] after which the scientist responsible for the unit, Professor Henry Bedson, committed suicide.[2] In light of this accident, all known stocks of smallpox were destroyed or transferred to one of two WHO reference laboratories; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States and the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR in Koltsovo, Russia where a regiment of troops guard it. In 1986, the World Health Organization recommended destruction of the virus, and later set the date of destruction to be 30 December 1993. This was postponed to 30 June 1995.[39] In 2002 the policy of the WHO changed to be against its final destruction.[40] Destroying existing stocks would reduce the risk involved with ongoing smallpox research; the stocks are not needed to respond to a smallpox outbreak.[41] However, the stocks may be useful in developing new vaccines, antiviral drugs, and diagnostic tests.[42]

In March 2003 smallpox scabs were found tucked inside an envelope in a book on Civil War medicine in Santa Fe, New Mexico.[43] The envelope was labeled as containing the scabs and listed the names of the patients they came from. Assuming the contents could be dangerous, the librarian who found them did not open the envelope. The scabs ended up with employees from the CDC who responded quickly once informed of the discovery. The discovery raised concerns that smallpox DNA could be extracted from these and other scabs and used for a biological attack.


with terrorism ?? again ........ up that creek.

I do some volunteer work on archaeological digs . It always amazes me that the archaeologists aren't more concerned about what they might dig up germ-wise.

It isn't the germs that scare the archs' its them Pharaoh curses ya hear so much about