Oops: Smallpox found in Maryland

In My Humble Opinion
21

I don’t know where they are getting that. Sounds like the writers should probably have checked with actual science type people.

Lyophilized virus will last for decades with no significant decay in titers. Even in the freezer, these samples should be fine for decades. I’ve thawed similar viral stocks that were at least 20 years old and never even considered that there wouldn’t be exactly the titer listed on the label. Hell, I wouldn’t bet against a sample that fell behind a freezer and was at room temp for 30 years having a bit of viable virus still in it!

Cite

Relevant quote from conclusion (admittedly this is for influenza, but I’ve worked with pox viruses and it’s likely similar):

“An archived preparation of virus is usually thought of as a frozen vial of virus suspension stored at -70°C or lower. Our study shows that for the viruses examined here, archival virus stocks do maintain similar viability as when initially prepared. This study further shows that there are other options available if long-term archival storage is not the primary goal and demonstrates the ability to store virus samples
at temperatures greater than -70°C and still have viable virus.”

This study is done by ATCC, and they are the go to people for these sort of things, so a very reputable group.

22

You’re so cute when you’re wildly optimistic that way :smiley:

I wonder just how many vials of weirdness are floating around in various sites, and if those sites will come clean about what they find in the frantic “SEARCH EVERYTHING OMG!” activity in the coming days.

23

On the bright side, at least it wasn’t medium or large pox. Or that scourge of the porn industry, XXXL pox.

24

Is there even enough vaccine available for the general public? IIRC it’s given to military folk, but it’s not a routine vaccination for the average person. I doubt I could go to my doc and ask for a smallpox shot.

BRB, looking for cow with cowpox.

25

Vaccinia is pretty widely available for laboratory use, but I doubt if there is a whole hell of a lot of vaccine preps out there.

As a graduate student, I was working with pox viruses and was vaccinated. Considering there isn’t much data on the long term efficacy of the vaccine, and it hasn’t been routinely used in decades, I might be one of the few vaccinated people in the country!

26

If I recall, after 9/11 and the anthrax… I don’t want to call it “scare” because it was certainly very real for those who became ill… the anthrax mailings the US government did produce more smallpox vaccine and stockpiled some. There might be more than you think. Certainly enough for a typical size outbreak to be contained. Now, if someone managed to trigger multiple scattered outbreaks that might be a very serious problem.

It’s pretty certain that without a booster or re-exposure to the virus the vaccine protection wears off in about 10 years, quite likely less. Certainly, the smallpox vaccine I received as an infant will no longer do me any good after nearly five decades.

27

Apparently they stopped giving out smallpox vaccinations in 1980. But the CDC does keep the vaccine on hand. They have enough vaccine to inoculate the entire population of the United States if needed.

However it probably wouldn’t be needed. You can inoculate people for smallpox after they’ve been exposed. So they would treat a theoretical smallpox outbreak like they would tuberculosis. Inoculate the people who were exposed and the people they had contact with and contain it rather than inoculate everyone pre-emptively. So we wouldn’t see any mass outbreaks like the Native Americans experienced because we now have the means to contain an outbreak.

28

People who are adults vaccinated as infants or toddlers (like me), are probably no longer protected. In fact, even living smallpox survivors, who’d be in their 60s at the youngest, IIRC, in the US, might still not hold titers. The reason is that people who had been vaccinated or survived the disease got natural boosters when there was still smallpox out and about, and that’s how immunity was maintained.

It’s not well-known, but adults actually need boosters of DTaP-- I think the recommendation is every ten years. When the Sabin live, attenuated polio vaccine was used, the attenuated virus was shed by vaccinated children, so people sort of got boosters that way. Now that the killed virus is used, I’m not sure what that means for people who have not had a booster for a very long time-- probably that if it’s been more than 20 years, you should get one before you travel overseas.

I’m not sure about measles, mumps and rubella. I don’t think there’s a recommendation for a booster for adults, so maybe there’s enough infectious agent in circulation that we still get boosters, or maybe our immune system hangs on to those antibodies longer for some reason.

There are two kinds, Variola major, and Variola minor. Variola major was pretty much a death sentence-- I think it had something like a 90% fatality rate, even in the 20th century, with anti-viral drugs, fever control, and control of secondary infections. The death rate of V. minor was still about 20%, and closer to 40% for babies and toddlers. Survivors could be left blind or deaf, or motor-impaired if they had pox in the ears or eyes, or if they develop encephalitis as a complication. The pox can open the skin to bacterial infections, and everyone who survives ends up scarred. A smallpox outbreak means hospitalizations. There’s also a horrible way of dying from a hemorrhagic form of smallpox.

And yet, somehow, I’ll bet there are plenty of hardcore anti-vaxxers who still wouldn’t bring their children in for vaccines. In fact, I can hear them saying idiotic stuff like “Vaccines deprived people of the opportunity for natural immunity, which is why we have an outbreak now,” and “Smallpox was already on the decline when vaccines became mandatory.”

29

Anti-virals didn’t start being developed until the 1960’s,which was after smallpox was already eradicated in most of the world. They didn’t really become clinically useful until the 1980’s, which was after smallpox was dead outside the laboratory.

Basically, we don’t know if any of our antivirals would be useful at all against smallpox as there hasn’t been an outbreak in which to test them. Scientists think there are a couple that would help but it would be completely unethical to test that hypothesis, and I for one hope we never have an outbreak in which to test them.

Most strains of V. major had a 30-35% mortality rate. There was at least one strain of V. major weaponized by the Russians that had a 90% mortality but so far as is publicly known there was never an outbreak of that strain.

Actually, V. minor usually had a fatality rate around 1% in the 20th Century.

Of course, the person’s immune system, age, general health, and other factors affect their chances of survival. It’s not know why in some people variola produces horrors like confluent smallpox (which more or less flays a person alive - usually fatal) or hemorrhagic pox (there is a certain parallel with ebola there. Essentially, you bleed to death under your skin, tissues can liquify - it’s pretty horrible just to read about it).

Survivors could be left blind or deaf, or motor-impaired if they had pox in the ears or eyes, or if they develop encephalitis as a complication. The pox can open the skin to bacterial infections, and everyone who survives ends up scarred. A smallpox outbreak means hospitalizations. There’s also a horrible way of dying from a hemorrhagic form of smallpox.

It’s probably worth pointing out that the vaccine inevitably causes scarring (I can still find my vaccination site after nearly a half century). This is of course not nearly as bad as smallpox scarring, but I’m sure the anti-vaxxers would freak out over a vaccine with a visible and permanent “side effect”.

30

Do livestock veterinarians have to worry about vaccinia?

31

According to the vaccine denialist cult (I’ve taken to calling them that, because their behavior is very much cultlike), the smallpox vaccine never did anything, and smallpox was never eradicated. It was merely renamed to “chickenpox” in order to convince the public that the smallpox vaccine had been effective.

These people are truly delusional.

32

My bad. I thought there was a clinically useful interferon that crossed smallpox in time.

90% was the figure I always found, but I guess one source could always be quoting the other, and it could all go back to the same misunderstanding. It had a pretty high mortality rate before the vaccine. After the Jenner vaccine, people still sometimes caught it it, but it was a mild disease in variolated people.

This is more to the point, anyway, since an outbreak in the 21c. would probably lead to a lot of people alive, but damaged.

Mine is less than 1cm in diameter, and on my back. Waaaaay less scarring than severe acne. Less scarring than my stretch marks, which are very small and faint compared to many women’s, and less scarring than my c-section incision.

Anti- vaxxers think smallpox was rebranded as chickenpox? Chickenpox and smallpox co-existed for a long, long time. I had chickenpox in 1970, and that was before the last recorded case of smallpox. That’s as ignorant as creationists saying that evolution doesn’t exist because H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis coexisted.

My evil twin wants to throw a vial of V. major into the next anti-vax meeting.

33

They also think the definition of polio was changed so that it looked like the polio vaccine was effective, but in reality, meningitis and multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy and multiple other paralytic conditions are all polio in hiding.

I spend far too much time on vaccine denialist cult websites and pages. It makes me mental.

34

They don’t even realize that polio was a sudden onset paralysis that came with fever and sometimes mild cold symptoms, and then most people would recover some use of the movement they had lost, although usually not all, while MS and MD are degenerative diseases? :smack:

35

No.

Oh, and say hey and by the way - polio was actually caused by DDT and other pesticides sprayed on fields, because it was a summer illness.

Because seasonal patterns of illness are made up by the CDC.

Seriously.

36

Well, then everyone who survived the WWII concentration camps, and got moved the Red Cross Displaced Person camps should have gotten polio, because they each got a DDT “shower” to get rid of their body lice. Big puff of DDT all over their bodies, sometimes right in the face.

37

They’re small scars, true, but can you name any other vaccine that routinely leaves a noticeable scar?

38

I was surprised by this, but here’s a cite for anyone else who was dubious.

39

A little side note: even after the US stopped routinely vaccinating infants for smallpox as part of the regular set of children’s vaccines, people traveling overseas continued to receive the vaccine. Sometimes it may have been a condition of the country issuing an incoming visa, but it was also an AMA recommendation. I was vaccinated for smallpox in 1967. My brother, who was born four years later, was not. But in 1976, when my brother and I got booster shots and TB tests before traveling to E. Europe and the Asian parts of the Soviet Union, my brother got a smallpox vaccine.

IIRC, there was a post-1976 case, but it was a researcher accidentally infected in the lab.

My husband got a smallpox vaccine before the Army shipped him to Iraq in 2005, but smallpox is not part of the regular battery of boosters given to inductees, which when I enlisted were DTaP, MMR, & polio. The meningococcal vaccine didn’t exist yet when I was inducted, but it may be part of the regular list now-- I’d be surprised if it isn’t.

40

Yeah, I think their most likely reaction would be to start small pox parties for their children so the can gain immunity “the natural way” on the good side it would give Darwinism a chance to weed out some stupidity.