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Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity on earth.
Officially, the smallpox virus exists in only two repositories: in freezers in a building called Corpus 6 at Vector in Siberia, and in a freezer in a building called the Maximum Containment Laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
There is most likely a fair amount of smallpox loose in the world. The fact is that nobody knows where all of it is or what, exactly, people intend to do with it.
contagious disease—you can’t catch anthrax from someone who has it, even if the victim coughs in your face—but smallpox could spread through North America like wildfire.
Viruses are the smallest forms of life. They are parasites that multiply inside the cells of their hosts, and they cannot multiply anywhere else. A virus is not strictly alive, but it is certainly not dead. It is described as a life-form.
Cytokines are messenger molecules that drift in the bloodstream. Cells in the immune system use them to signal to one another while the immune system mounts a response to an attack by an invader. In a cytokine storm, the signaling goes haywire, and the immune system becomes unbalanced and cracks up, like a network going down.
The genome of smallpox has about 187,000 letters, which is one of the longest genomes of any virus. Smallpox uses a lot of this code to defeat the immune system of its human host. It has about two hundred genes (which make the virus’s two hundred proteins).
the AIDS virus, HIV, has only ten genes. In terms of the natural design of a virus, HIV has a simple design that works well. HIV is a bicycle, while smallpox is a Cadillac loaded with tail fins and every option in
flat hemorrhagic smallpox, in which the skin does not blister but remains smooth. It darkens until it can look charred, and it can slip off the body in sheets. Doctors in the old days used to call it black pox. Hemorrhagic smallpox seems
twenty percent of the people inside the south wing of the St. Walberga Hospital contracted smallpox. Eighty percent of them were on floors above Los’s floor, and with the exception of Father Kunibert, not one of them had provably seen Los’s face.
years to reach roughly fifty million cases of AIDS. Variola could reach that point in ten or twenty weeks.
Poxviruses keep herds and swarms of living things in check, preventing them from growing too large and overwhelming their habitats. Viruses are an essential part of nature.
If all the viruses on the planet were to disappear, a global catastrophe would ensue, and the natural ecosystems of the earth would collapse in a spectacular crash under burgeoning populations of insects. Viruses are nature’s crowd control, and a poxvirus can thin a crowd in a hurry. For most
The Hindu religion has a goddess of smallpox, named Shitala Ma, and there are temples in her honor all over India.
1763, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, the head of the British forces, wrote a letter to one of his field officers, Colonel Henry Bouquet: “Could it not be contrived to send smallpox among these disaffected tribes of Indians?” Amherst asked. “We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.”
A terrible cyclone had hit the delta of the Ganges River in the Bay of Bengal, in what was then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and the eye of the cyclone had passed over an island named Bhola. A hundred and fifty thousand people had drowned when a tidal surge had covered the entire island.
They felt that smallpox was an emanation of the goddess of smallpox, Shitala Ma, and that therefore the disease was part of the sacred order of the world; it was the dharma of people to have visitations from the disease.
They had a hundred and fifty thousand people working for the program, mostly on very small salaries. For a year and a half, at the peak of the campaign, every house in India was called on once a month by a health worker to see if anyone there had smallpox. There were a hundred and twenty million houses in India, and Brilliant estimates that the program made almost two billion house calls during that year and a half.
After he helped to eradicate smallpox, Larry Brilliant did other things: he became one of Jerry Garcia’s physicians; he became the founder and co-owner of the Well, a famous early Internet operation; he became the CEO of SoftNet, a software company that reached three billion dollars in value on the stock market during the wild years of the Internet; he and Girija had three children; he became a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan;
Today, the Seva Foundation has cured two million people of blindness in
train station in Bihar—the Tatanagar Station outbreak.
Tatanagar outbreak blew up into the largest outbreak of smallpox in the world during the years of the Eradication, and it came as a total surprise.
variola major that came from those scabs is known today as the Rahima. All six of her scabs are said to have been used up in scientific research, but the Rahima exists,
Variola is now exotic to the human species, highly infective in humans, lethal, and difficult or impossible to cure. It is generally believed to be the most dangerous virus to the human species.
(The cells are HeLa cells, cervical-cancer cells derived from an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks, who died in Baltimore in 1951. Her cancer cells have become a cornerstone of medical research and have saved many human lives.)
