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Nov 17, 2022 · Along the way, smallpox wreaked death and destruction. HISTORY notes that the disease may have been responsible for the Antonine Plague of 165 to 180 C.E., which killed an estimated 3.5 million to 7 million people and helped bring about the fall of the Roman Empire. And smallpox and other illnesses wiped out a shocking 90 percent of indigenous ...
- Kaleena Fraga
- Smallpox: Disease, Transmission & Symptoms
- Empirical View
- How Was Global Decline & Eradication Achieved?
- Correlates & Consequences
What is smallpox?
Smallpox is an infectious disease that is caused by the variola virus. It spreads from one person to another, either directly or indirectly. The variola virus infects only humans – other animals are unable to catch smallpox. There are two types of variola viruses – variola major and variola minor – with the former type being much more severe and deadly.
Symptoms
The classic symptom of smallpox is the rash – these are pustules covering a patient's entire body. After being infected with the variola virus, patients usually have no symptoms for 10–14 days (which is called the incubation period) followed by symptoms like a fever and headache – which resemble a common cold – for 2–3 days. Since these symptoms are not specific to smallpox, it can be very difficult to tell from symptoms alone that they have been infected.3 On average, it then takes 24 hours...
Origins of smallpox
The origin of the variola virus and the time since when it infected humans are uncertain. Classic symptoms of smallpox – the skin eruptions and pustules – have been identified in mummified individuals dating back to 1100–1500 BCE in Egypt.10 One of these was Pharaoh Ramses V who died in 1157 BCE. The photograph of his skull below shows small pustules, especially on his cheeks.11 The origins and evolution of smallpox have been further explored further using paleogenomic evidence, which involve...
How many died of smallpox?
Donald Henderson – who directed the WHO’s program to eradicate smallpox worldwide – reports that, during the 20th century alone, "an estimated 300 million people died of the disease" in his review paper “The eradication of smallpox – An overview of the past, present, and future”.17 He also suggests that in the last hundred years of its existence smallpox killed “at least half a billion people.”18Over a century, this translates to around 5 million annual deaths on average.
Long-run smallpox deaths in Europe
The graph shows the death rate over the long run in some European countries. The data spans the period from 1774 to 1900 in European countries for which data was available. Two phenomena are illustrated here. First, Swedish data, which pre-dates the smallpox vaccine in 1796, shows the large disease burden and endemicity of smallpox in the 18th century. In peak years, up to 7 out of 1000 people in Sweden died of smallpox, and the endemic disease had volatile outbreaks. Second, countries that h...
Eradication of smallpox
The last variola major infection was recorded in Bangladesh in October 1975, while the last variola minor infection occurred two years later in Merka, Somalia, on October 26th, 1977. During the following two years, WHO teams searched the African continent for further smallpox cases among people with rash-like symptoms, which can be a symptom of several diseases. They found no further cases of smallpox. In 1978, a laboratory accident in the United Kingdom occurred where a variola virus sample...
Vaccine against smallpox
At the end of the 18th century, British surgeon and physician Edward Jenner (1749-1823) pioneered the first-ever vaccination against an infectious disease. He had been inoculated through variolation at the age of 8, and later as a surgeon, variolation was part of his work.23 He also observed that people who had suffered from cowpoxwould subsequently have a very mild, if at all visible, reaction to the smallpox variolation. This was because the cowpox and variola viruses were members of the sa...
Smallpox Eradication Program
It was only with the establishment of the World Health Organization (WHO) that international quality standards for the production of smallpox vaccines were introduced. This shifted the fight against smallpox from a national to an international agenda. It was also the first time that global data collection on the prevalence of smallpox was undertaken. By 1959, the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the World Health Organization (WHO), had passed a resolution to eradicate smallpox glo...
Overcoming the last mile problem: ring vaccination
Smallpox's eradication was greatly spurred by making use of the fact that smallpox transmission occurs via air droplets. Initially, the WHO had pursued a strategy of mass vaccination which attempted to vaccinate as many people as possible, hoping that herd immunity (explained in our vaccine topic page) would protect the whole population. Soon, however, vaccination efforts were targeted locally around smallpox cases, because smallpox was transmitted by sick patients' air droplets. This practic...
Impact on life expectancy
Did smallpox variolation and vaccination against smallpox have a notable impact on life expectancy? Many have claimed that inoculation against smallpox was one of the first measures that had a positive effect on life expectancy. Angus Deaton (2013) makes this claim based on a book by Razzell (1977), which reviews existing birth, baptism and burial records in various counties of 18th century Britain.29 30 It is hard to prove such claims because of the limited amount of high-quality data on bot...
Costs of smallpox and its eradication
By the time the World Health Organization launched the Intensified Smallpox Eradication Program in 1967 many countries, most of them high income countries, had already eliminated smallpox. Therefore, the total cost of eradicating smallpox is very challenging to estimate – as individual country programs reach back to before records of public health expenditure existed. Nonetheless, the Intensified Smallpox Eradication Program has been estimated to have cost $300 million in total from 1967 to 1...
It was declared eradicated in 1980 following a global immunization campaign led by the World Health Organization. Smallpox is an acute contagious disease caused by the variola virus, a member of the orthopoxvirus family. It was one of the world's most devastating diseases known to humanity. The last known natural case was in Somalia in 1977.
Smallpox killed some 300 million people worldwide in the 20th century before it was eradicated in 1977. Today the biggest threat from smallpox comes from its possible use as a bioterrorism...
Apr 12, 2024 · Dr. Zhilong Yang, an associate professor in the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, served on a national committee that studied the threat of a new smallpox outbreak. Smallpox, a disease that killed an estimated 500 million people in the 20th century alone, is the only human disease to be eradicated.
In 18th-century Europe, it is estimated that 400,000 people died from the disease per year, and that one-third of all cases of blindness were due to smallpox. [10] [18] Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to 300 million people in the 20th century [19] [20] and around 500 million people in the last 100 years of its existence. [21]
Smallpox killed some 300 million people worldwide in the 20th century before it was eradicated in 1977. Today the biggest threat from smallpox comes from its possible use as a bioterrorism agent ...
