BACKGROUND A bioterrorist release of smallpox is a constant threat to the population of the USA and other countries. DESIGN A stochastic simulation model of the spread of smallpox due to a large bioterrorist attack in a structured population was constructed. Disease natural history parameter estimates, time lines of behavioral activities, and control scenarios were based on the literature and...

From a public health perspective the disease of smallpox was officially declared eradicated in 1980 – the result of a successful global initiative led by the World Health Organization (WHO), the first and to date only success against a disease in humans. The world could celebrate its freedom from a dreaded disease. Much of the literature about the history of smallpox – a disease that has fascin...

The New World was ravaged by smallpox for several centuries after the Spanish conquest. Jenner’s discovery of the smallpox vaccine made possible the prevention and control of smallpox epidemics. In response to a large outbreak of smallpox in the Spanish colonies, King Charles IV appointed Francisco Xavier de Balmis to lead an expedition that would introduce Jenner’s vaccine to these colonies. D...

The campaigns to prevent smallpox in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are commonly understood as the first attempts of large-scale state-sponsored medical intervention in society as such. 1 Before the discovery of the cowpox vaccine inoculation with variolous matterÐknown as variolationÐwas the most widespread preventive against the disease. This practice was well established in parts of...

Scientists and clinicians studying a particular disease have an ideal goal that, if achieved, would be paradoxical: finding the disease cure and thereby putting themselves out of work. 2015 marks the 35th year since the cure for smallpox eradicated this human scourge. Before a vaccine was developed, infection with smallpox virus occurred in over 10 million people per year around the world, with...