Smallpox – the viral smoke demon
(composed after reading an amazing book by Richard Preston - The Demon in the Freezer)
Virus is the nature’s crowd control. A virus uses the machinery and energy of its host cell to make copies of itself as it cannot live an independent existence outside the cell of its host. Smallpox was the first urban virus. To survive, smallpox needs a population of at least 200,000 with a maximum of 14 days of travel within one another. Smallpox is also known as Variola, and its weakness is that it can only replicate inside the human body. The incubation period for variola is 11-14 days. Smallpox particles are of the same size as smoke particles and behave (i.e. spread) in the same manner. Having caused over a billion deaths in the last 100 years, smallpox is considered to be the most dangerous and devastating virus of all to the human species. Smallpox is the mother of all biological weapons.
At first, smallpox looks like flu, but one who’s affected with smallpox remains in the state of wakefulness as the host sees and feels everything what’s happening. It is a perfectly horrifying experience. Each of the infected might directly infect between 3 and 20 others. Therefore, millions can be affected in a few months if control is absent. For example, approximately 20 years are required for 50 million AIDS cases, but for smallpox, the same amount of cases would occur in just about 10 to 20 weeks. There are 200 genes that constitute smallpox versus 10 of HIV. Smallpox is a potential biological chain reaction.
Smallpox virus interacts with the victim’s immune system in different ways, and so it triggers different forms of disease in the human body. There is a mild type of smallpox called a varioloid rash. There is classical ordinary smallpox, which comes in two basic forms: the discrete type and the confluent type. In discrete ordinary smallpox, the pustules stand out on the skin as separate blisters, and the patient has a better chance of survival. In confluent type ordinary smallpox, the blisters merge into sheets, and it is typically fatal. Finally, there is hemorrhagic smallpox, in which bleeding occurs in the skin. Hemorrhagic smallpox is virtually one hundred percent fatal. The blood in the eyes of a smallpox patient deteriorates over time, and if the patient lives long enough the whites of the eyes will turn solid black. The most extreme type is flat hemorrhagic smallpox, in which the skin does not blister but remains smooth. It darkens until it can look charred, and it can slip off the body in sheets. With flat hemorrhagic smallpox, the immune system goes into shock, and cannot produce pus, while the virus amplifies with incredible speed and appears to sweep through the major organs of the body. Doctors in the old days used to call it black pox. Hemorrhagic smallpox seems to occur in about three to twenty-five percent of the fatal cases, depending on how hot or virulent the strain of smallpox is. For some reason black pox is more common in teenagers. The exact cause of death for the fatal smallpox is unknown to science.
Smallpox was needed to be eradicated as the vaccine itself rarely but did pose a fatal threat (it also cost too much to deal with the epidemics). From Latin, virus means “poison” and vaccine means “cow.” Smallpox was defeated with a “vaccine virus” (cowpox – cow virus). A discovery at the time was made that immunity is strengthened to a disease causing virus by infection with a milder similar virus. Each successfully vaccinated person would become infected with vaccinia (mild cousin of variola). They would develop a single pustule on the upper arm at the site of vaccination. The pustule is an ugly blister that would leak pus, ooze, and crust, and many would feel woozy and a little feverish for a couple of days afterwards as vaccinia replicates in the skin and a scar would develop on the upper arm. Meanwhile, the immune system would go into a system of screaming alarm. Vaccinia and smallpox are so much alike that the immune system has trouble telling them apart. Within days, a vaccinated person’s resistance to smallpox begins to rise. Unfortunately, the immune system’s “memory” of the vaccinia infection fades and the vaccination begins to wear off after about five years. The vaccine is useless if applied to the host more than 4 days after being infected as the virus spreads too quickly and the immune system wouldn’t work fast enough to heal the body. Today, almost everyone who was vaccinated against smallpox in childhood has lost much or all of their immunity to it.
No fossil evidence was ever found of viruses, so their origin remains a great mystery.
Below: A false-color electron micrograph shows the smallpox variola virus. Formerly an epidemic infectious disease that resulted in permanent scarring and often in death, smallpox was eradicated by 1979 through a worldwide program of vaccination. Today only two laboratories in the world keep stocks of the virus, for research purposes and to make new vaccine should the need for it ever again arise. (From: Photo Researchers, Inc./London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine/Science Source)