Quotes About Smallpox

There is no question but that perfect sanitation has almost obliteraed this disease, smallpox, and sooner or later, will dispose of it entirely. Of course when that time comes, in all probability, the credit will be given to vaccination.

For long-duration exploration missions, NASA is looking for folks with a lot of operational, hands-on experience, people who have been in field-type situations such as military deployments. In my case, I worked in the Congo and in Biosafety Level 4 labs on smallpox.

But in just the past hundred years or so, we have turned the tables and taken control of biology. Smallpox, a virus that killed as many as 300 million people in the first part of the twentieth century (far more than in all wars combined) has not merely been tamed but has been eradicated from the planet.

His championship of smallpox inoculations for the colonies was an unprecedented public health policy in colonial times.

Affectation is a greater enemy to the face than smallpox.

The next week both small pox and the bloody flux began to go through the camp. General Washington maintained that the flux came from drinking new cider. But the cider-drinking continued, and so for that matter did the flux, which is a terrible death, the bowels emptying out one's life in bloody spasms. I

Tests showed there was no enrichment. "They're just slinging purified uranium at us, straight from the mines," Bob said. But the next week Bob fell ill. A red rash spread from his face all over his body. The bumps were as big as marbles and itched "like the bejesus," he said in a feverish daze. He died two days later of smallpox. •

In 1967, the world health community launched a global effort to eradicate smallpox. It took a coordinated, worldwide effort, required the commitment of every government, and cost $130 million dollars. By 1977, smallpox had disappeared.

The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world, there's only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease, I think, is gonna be guinea worm.

Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.

As a psycholinguist who once wrote an entire book on the past tense, I can single out my favorite example in the history of the English language. It comes from the first sentence of a Wikipedia entry: Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. Yes, smallpox was.

It was our ability to refocus India from herd immunity to attacking the virus that allowed smallpox eradication to succeed.")

If you want to imagine what a disease might do if it became bad in every possible way, you could do no better than consider the case of smallpox. Smallpox is almost certainly the most devastating disease in the history of humankind.

For instance," said Alan, "we're now learning that the smallpox pandemics of the Middle Ages, not the plague, mind you, but smallpox, left generations of people with a rare genetic defect that protects them against infection by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. We estimate that approximately one percent of people descended from northern Europeans are virtually immune to HIV infection.

Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World's Indian population.

You don't have to vaccinate every man, woman and child in the country if you have a couple of cases of smallpox cropping up.

Throughout world history, the greatest killers have not been wars but plagues and epidemics. Unfortunately, it is possible that nations have kept secret stockpiles of deadly diseases, such as smallpox, which could be weaponized using biotechnology to create havoc.

Smallpox can be personally devastating. After a 14-day incubation period, patients experience high fevers, headaches, and sometimes severe abdominal pain. A rash resembling chicken pox appears in the mouth and throat, face, and forearms, and spreads to the trunk and legs. As patients recover, scabs break and pitted scars appear.

There are cases where government-to-government aid actually has worked. Look at the eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of polio. But these are really top down solutions that require government-to-government support and aid.

When the World Health Organization officially declared smallpox eradicated in 1980, those laboratory stocks remained. All it would take to reverse that eradication was for someone to accidentally set the virus loose.

Terrorists might even try to use it as a biological weapon. Making matters worse, people were no longer getting smallpox vaccines, and so what immunity the public had to the virus was waning.

Over the past three thousand years, smallpox may have killed more people than any other disease on Earth.

Between 1400 and 1800, smallpox killed an estimated five hundred million people every century in Europe alone.

Smallpox was the worst disease in history. It killed more people than all the wars in history.