BTW, this probably hit the big science news just now (haven’t checked links), but articles about its eradication have been going out in the last year or so.
IIRC, I did mention that it had been eradicated last year in some thread about animal diseases.
Jackmanii, didn’t get your last line about Prince.
Rinderpest has been a foreign animal disease in many countries for a long time. Most cattle are NOT vaccinated with it. Only cattle in what were the endemic areas were/are vaccinated against it, that’s how they controlled the infection. For most of the world, quarantine and culling worked just fine. But you cannot do that with people.
Even though the pox viruses are having a bad time of it with another member of the tribe shot down, other viruses are reviving thanks to illogical fears about vaccination.
Europe for instance is having a measles outbreak (about 5,000 cases in France for the first three months of 2011, about the same number as for all of 2010), and low immunization rates are blamed. And how are parents reacting? Check out responses to the mother who posted this query on Mumsnet (a British parenting website), wondering if the specter of measles (a very real threat) is worse than the imagined prospect of autoimmune disease due to vaccination).
Note that while some posters wisely point out the risks of measles, nobody is chastising her over the prospect of her kid catching measles in France and bringing it back home to the U.K. to infect others.
Your comment about “the virus similar to rinderpest” reminded me of “The Artist formerly known as Prince”. Meh, if you gotta explain…
I can’t fathom why we still have smallpox samples in labs. Sequence the full genome and then incinerate that bad boy. In the unlikely event that it somehow turns out in the future that we need it for something, recreate it from the genome sequence, use it for whatever it’s needed for, and then re-extinctify it. The only benefit I can see to keeping actual samples is that it provides job security for authors of international-terrorism thrillers.
I’ve also heard rumors that there are still wild reservoirs of the disease in a few isolationist middle-of-nowhere tribes that the doctors were never able to get to, but that’s of course unconfirmable.
Now there’s something for the anti-vaxxers to chew over.
“We understand your concerns about vaccine safety, ma’am. Just so you understand that if either little Timmy or little Susie do get sick, both of them will have to be humanely destroyed.”
Sure. As far as viruses are concerned, it’s a very well-established technique. Here’s an example for vaccinia virus, a poxvirus that is closely related to variola (the smallpox agent). If it works for vaccinia, I don’t see a reason why it shouldn’t work for variola, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if both the CDC and the Russians had done it.
AFAICT that paper simply describes cloning by means of a bacterial artificial chromosome - the DNA still needs to exist physically to start with, the procedure simply copies it. I think walrus is asking if we can synthesise an entire genome just from a computer record of its sequence. My understanding of THAT is that we can only do small stretches of DNA (maybe a few dozen bases?) at the moment, not entire genomes.
Having said that, I remember that a few months ago Craig Venter’s team made world headlines with their ‘synthia’ organism, so maybe they have indeed figured out how to make a whole genome out of a bunch of nucleotides and a flash drive. But I should imagine it’s very cutting edge stuff, probably about as difficult now as genome sequencing was when they’d just done the human genome draft.
Like the vaccinia experiment I linked to above, this did not involve a de novo synthesis of the genome, though. As far as poliovirus is concerned, that took another 20 years.
With today’s technology, the artificial synthesis and assembly of the variola virus genome (only 25 times larger than that of poliovirus) is entirely feasible if somewhat costly. The subsequent rescue of infectious virus, on the other hand, is trivial.
