The Pros And Cons Of Smallpox

Abstract

Smallpox is a dangerous and highly contagious disease. It is described as a disfiguring disease due to the bumps that appear on an infected person, once gone through their entire cycle they leave behind deep pitted scars. There are two strains of smallpox, variola major and variola minor. Variola major is the most common form of smallpox with more dangerous outcomes than variola minor. Smallpox is transmitted via direct face to face prolonged contact with an infected person but can also be transmitted through direct contact with bodily fluid from an infected carrier. There is currently no treatment for smallpox however there are vaccines to prevent the disease.

Introduction

Smallpox is an illness caused by the variola virus.

He removed pus from a milkmaid with cowpox, which is very similar to smallpox and inserted the pus into the arm of an eight year old healthy boy. His findings were that a person can become protected from it without having to be directly exposed to the disease. This came to be the world’s first successful vaccine and eventually became the downfall to smallpox. In 1949, the last reported case came from the United States, and in 1967 the World Health Organization launched a global campaign to immunize for smallpox in hopes of eradicating smallpox once and for all. That same year there was a reported 10 million to 15 million cases of smallpox with around 2 million deaths and a decade later the number was down to zero. Since then, no one has contracted the disease except for a Somalian worker on 1977. On May 8, 1980 the World Health Organization’s member declared that smallpox had been eradicated.

Poxviridae are linear, double-stranded deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) viruses that replicate in the cytoplasm. “Poxviridae consists of 2 subfamilies: Chordopoxvirinae, which infects vertebrates, and Entomopoxvirinae, which infects insects”. (Medscape.com, 2015) Smallpox is a double stranded, 135 to 375 kilo base DNA virus. The virus replicates in the cytoplasm of the host cell and forms B-type inclusion bodies, unlike varicella or herpes viruses which replicate in the nucleus. According to Medscape.com “The orthopoxviruses are among the largest and most complex of all viruses. The virion is brick shaped, with a diameter of approximately 200 nm”. It has two envelopes, the core membrane which surrounds the core of the virus and contains the lipids and proteins and the outer envelope which is only present in the extracellular state. The core of the virus has a dumbbell shape contains 10 enzymes to mediate gene expression and nucleoproteins. It also contains large amounts if double stranded DNA. (CIDRAP.com,