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USAMRIID’s mission is to develop defenses against biological weapons, both medicines and methods, and to help protect the population against a terrorist attack with a biological weapon.
The authors of the Big Red Book had led the World Health Organization campaign to eradicate smallpox from the face of the earth, and on December 9, 1979, their efforts were officially certified a success. The disease no longer existed in nature. 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.
All of this is crazy.
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. But, as Peter Jahrling often says, “If you believe smallpox is sitting in only two freezers, I have a bridge for you to buy. The genie is out of the lamp.”
This is also crazy. And terrifying.
Smallpox virus interacts with the victims’ immune systems in different ways, and so it triggers different forms of disease in the human body. There is a mild type of smallpox called a varioloid rash. There is classical ordinary smallpox, which comes in two basic forms: the discrete type and the confluent type. In discrete ordinary smallpox, the pustules stand out on the skin as separate blisters, and the patient has a better chance of survival. In confluent-type ordinary smallpox, which Los had, the blisters merge into sheets, and it is typically fatal. Finally, there is hemorrhagic smallpox,
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Absolutely fascinating, how different this virus can be from person to person.
Barbara Birke remained alert and conscious nearly up to the end, which came four days after the first signs of rash appeared on her body. For some reason, variola leaves its victims in a state of wakefulness. They see and feel everything that’s happening.
Controversial opinion time: Just end it. If you're at this point -
if your body has be totally overrun with disease; if your life has been whittled down to being nothing more than a bedridden, bloody, and excruciating bioreactor for an extremely contagious virus; if it's certainly fatal yet cruel enough to keep you conscious through the entire ordeal - just end it.
I understand that doctors and nurses must do no harm, but allowing someone to live through that kind of suffering is inhumane, especially when a simple injection or a mask of nitrogen could ease it.
The exact cause of death in fatal smallpox is unknown to science.
Insane. Hard to believe.
It has taken the world twenty years to reach roughly fifty million cases of AIDS. Variola could reach that point in ten or twenty weeks.
Viruses have many means of survival, and one of the most important is a virus’s ability to change natural hosts. Species become extinct; viruses move on.
Rascally little shits.
the poxes of insects.
I didn't know these existed. Way cool.
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.
People have become its only natural host. Wherever it had come from in nature, it had actually lost the ability to infect its original host, and indeed, perhaps its original host had gone extinct. Variola had no reservoir of hosts in nature in which it could hide and continue to cycle if there was an attempt to eradicate it from people.
Monkeypox is an emerging virus that is making trans-species jumps into people in smoldering outbreaks in the rain forests of the Congo. Monkeypox may or may not one day take the natural place of smallpox vis-à-vis the human species.
Yikes.
A study done by the WHO suggested that the world was losing one and a half billion dollars a year in economic damage caused by illness and complications from the vaccine.
Makes me wonder how high the price would have to have been in order for this eradication effort to not be worth it...
When scientists handle variola, international rules require them to wear full space suits and to be inside a sealed Biosafety Level 4 containment zone. The WHO forbids any laboratory from possessing more than ten percent of the DNA of variola, and no one is officially allowed to do experiments with smallpox DNA. 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.
There are about four hundred and fifty different strains of smallpox inside the freezer.
Plague and smallpox are not tactical weapons. They can’t be used in any sort of limited attack: they are designed to go out of control. They are intended to kill large numbers of people indiscriminately, and they have no other function.
Does this make them better or worse as strategic weapons? How do you then protect your own people from infection? Unless you control the cure as well, of course...
dark biology.
Apt and interesting phrase.
They were paying Hensley thirty-eight thousand dollars a year, but was it worth it? If you infected yourself with Ebola, that was it.
Nope.
HeLa cells,
!!
They would not rest, they would not stand aside, and they gave all they had until variola was gone. No greater deed was ever done in medicine, and no better thing ever came from the human spirit.
Agreed.
The virus’s last strategy for survival was to bewitch its host and become a source of power. We could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart.
Chilling.
