WHA33.3 Declaration of global eradication of smallpox
The Thirty-Third World Health Assembly, on this the eighth day of May 1980;
Having considered the development and results of the global programme on smallpox eradication initiated by WHO in 1958 and intensified since 1967;
Declares most solemnly that the world and all its peoples have won freedom from smallpox, which was a most devastating disease sweeping in epidemic form through many countries since earliest times, leaving death, blindness and disfigurement in its wake, and which only a decade ago was rampant in Africa, Asia and South America;
Expresses its deep gratitude to all nations and individuals who contributed to the success of this noble and historic endeavour;
Calls this unprecedented achievement in the history of public health to the attention of all nations, which by their collective action have freed mankind of this ancient scourge and, in so doing, have demonstrated how nations working together in a common cause may further human progress.
(Source: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/154893/WHA33_1980-REC-1_eng.pdf, the record of proceedings of the 1980 World Health Assembly.)
(We celebrate in December because the Global Commission for the Certification of Smallpox Eradication published their report on December 9th 1979.)
What I love about this is that this paper is from April 2025, this year! Mendel discovered these principles and published them in 1866, he didn't understand what the units of inheritance were (he didn't even call them genes, he just called them factors) just how they were transmitted and expressed, his work went unexamined until it was rediscovered (decades later in 1900) and forever changed biology, it is taught in every single biology course since then
But we didn't know WHAT those specific genes in pea plants were exactly, we just knew how they were transmitted and expressed, we were the exact same as Mendel after all this time
But now we know, we know the exact genes, their locus, their pathways and DNA sequences. We finished his work. I hope he's happy.
@caesarsaladinn I had a whole discussion with a history major who was extremely confident that smallpox is a “common childhood illness” with a very low death rate. Therefore, she believed that historical smallpox outbreaks were either massively exaggerated or used as a cover-up for something else (since “smallpox isn’t that bad.”) I eventually asked if she was possibly confusing smallpox with chickenpox, at which point she said, “aren’t they the same thing?”
One of the less deadly variants of smallpox was called cowpox, and the fact that dairy maids who contracted it tended to avoid the worst affects of smallpox is part of the development of vaccination
Cowpox is actually a separate (but very similar!) virus!
There's a lot of confusion about different "poxes" in this post (which wasn't my intention, and now I feel bad), so here's a general overview (also, obligatory apology for messiness, this was written at like 1 AM):
Smallpox:
Smallpox, caused by variola virus, was a massive problem historically. It existed in the Western hemisphere for thousands of years (genetic evidence of smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies from ≈1500 BCE, but it was probably around long before then), and it was introduced to the New World during the Columbian exchange, which had devastating consequences for indigenous populations (which were already suffering from colonialist violence, which made epidemics much worse than they already would've been). Historically, smallpox had a case fatality rate between 30-50%, and survivors were often left disfigured or permanently disabled (you've probably seen pictures of smallpox scars, but smallpox can also cause blindness and other complications). Importantly, smallpox only affects humans—it has no animal hosts—which is why it's one of the few infectious diseases to have been completely eradicated. As of May 8, 1980, it officially no longer exists outside of certain designated American and Russian laboratories. (There are, however, concerns that it could be used as a bioweapon, which is why the government still stockpiles smallpox vaccines and antivirals. I wrote my bioethics term paper on this exact issue, and incidentally, it's one of the major reasons why I believe that STEM majors should take ethics courses!)
There were two strains of variola virus: variola major and variola minor. Variola major was much more dangerous, with a much higher mortality rate; variola minor typically didn't cause severe disease. Fortunately, infection with one strain conferred immunity against the other. Both strains are now eradicated. (People sometimes confuse variola minor with other viruses like cowpox and horsepox, but they're different things.)
There were four clinical forms of smallpox: ordinary (classic smallpox, associated with the rash you usually see in pictures), modified (less severe, often occurred in vaccinated people who got infected anyway), malignant (caused a flat rash instead of the usual pustules, associated with immune dysfunction, almost always fatal), and hemorrhagic (caused severe bleeding, and also near-universally fatal.) All of the non-ordinary forms could be difficult to diagnose because they looked so different from typical smallpox. The less serious "modified" form was often confused with chickenpox, and the hemorrhagic form was sometimes assumed to be a completely different disease. Occasionally, historical sources will refer to hemorrhagic smallpox as "black pox," with or without an understanding that it's caused by the same virus as ordinary smallpox.
Other relevant viruses:
Cowpox, caused by cowpox virus (an orthopoxvirus similar to smallpox) causes mild disease in cows, humans, and several other animals. Infection with cowpox virus confers immunity to variola—Edward Jenner noticed this relationship and used material from cowpox lesions to inoculate people against smallpox.
Vaccinia virus, another orthopoxvirus, is the source of the modern smallpox vaccine. It's closely related to both cowpox and horsepox (weirdly, it's actually closer to horsepox), but it's distinct enough to be its own species. Infection usually causes mild symptoms, and, of course, confers immunity to smallpox.
Chickenpox is an entirely different thing. It's caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which is a herpesvirus, not a poxvirus at all! Infection with varicella-zoster does not confer immunity to smallpox or any other poxvirus—chickenpox is from a totally different family.
So why are the names so weird and confusing? Why is everything about all of this so weird and confusing?
There are multiple reasons for this, so bear with me.
Historically, a "pox" was any disease that caused a bumpy rash of pustles/blisters. Chickenpox, smallpox, and the other "poxes" all cause superficially similar rashes—thus the similar names. (Even though we know now that chickenpox comes from a completely different family, this wouldn't have been apparent before the dawn of modern medicine.)
Smallpox was given that name to differentiate it from syphilis, which was known as the "great pox" when it first appeared in Europe. (Fun[?] microbiology fact: There are debates about the origins of syphilis, but the most common theory holds that it originated in the New World, and Christopher Columbus brought it back to Spain. In that way, it's kind of the inverse of smallpox.) Historically, smallpox was also known by a variety of other names in different European, Asian, and African cultures. Again, this gets murky, because historical physicians sometimes struggled to distinguish between similar-looking-but-different diseases.
Other poxviruses are often named after the animals in which they were first identified. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though, and it can sometimes be misleading (for example, monkeypox virus was first discovered in laboratory monkeys, but it more often affects rodents and other small mammals. The disease formerly known as "monkeypox" was recently renamed "mpox" because the name wasn't accurate.) Also, some poxviruses aren't named after animals at all! It's a weird and inconsistent system (but a lot of virus names are kinda weird and inconsistent).
Related to the above: We don't even know where the name "chickenpox" comes from. I mean, we know it was called a "pox" because it causes a pox-y rash, but we don't know where the "chicken" part originated. There are multiple theories about this, none of which are definitive. The disease itself has nothing to do with chickens.
Basically, a lot of the weirdness is a result of historical naming practices—people identified and named these diseases before modern virology existed, and those names stuck, so now we have similar names for superficially-similar-but-ultimately-different viruses, and names whose origins have been completely lost to time. Later, virologists muddied the waters further by naming newly-discovered poxviruses after the animals in which they were first seen, even when these animals aren't natural hosts or reservoirs of those viruses. It's a mess! And, again, all of this is complicated by the fact that some of these diseases were very hard to diagnose (or distinguish from one another) before modern medicine existed. Now, we can sequence viral DNA and figure out what's actually going on—which viruses caused which symptoms, whether those viruses were closely related, and whether being infected with one disease conferred immunity to another—but historical doctors and scientists didn't have those tools, so they were doing they best they could with very limited information, and that led to a lot of weirdness in terms of how these viruses were named and classified. Our current system inherited some of that weirdness, so here we are.
TL;DR: Poxvirus names are messy. Smallpox is caused by variola virus, which has two strains: variola major (the more severe one) and variola minor (less severe). Cowpox and vaccinia are different viruses in the same family, and being infected with one of them confers immunity to smallpox. Chickenpox isn't a poxvirus at all, but a herpesvirus—it just happens to cause a pockmark-y rash that looks superficially similar to smallpox pustules (and mild forms of smallpox were historically confused with chickenpox).
(P.S. none of this is super relevant to the average person, so don't feel bad if you didn't know any of it. Unless you are a history major inventing new conspiracies about smallpox, in which case you definitely should feel bad.)
Sources & further reading under the cut!
Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination
The History of Smallpox (CDC)
The Triumph of Science: The Incredible Story of Smallpox Eradication
Scientific Background on Smallpox and Smallpox Vaccination (from Scientific and Policy Considerations in Developing Smallpox Vaccination Options: A Workshop Report) <- this article is like 20 years old, but it has some interesting information about the clinical forms of smallpox and how difficult they would be to diagnose accurately
Phasing out monkeypox: mpox is the new name for an old disease <- discusses the renaming of monkeypox to mpox, also mentions issues with other poxvirus names and virus names in general
Poxes great and small: The stories behind their names
Show us your homework, I bet a licensed biologist or something will pop out of the tumblr woodwork to talk u through it. (One time in my high school senior year I sobbed in front of my English teacher because I got a D and she was just like '...you don't... need this class to graduate' and when that somehow stopped my breakdown she confusedly shooed me off to lunch)
i already messaged my teacher and asked to see the correct punnet squares but here are screenshots in case any of u want to tell me if I'm just dumb and missing something obvious
ok the irony and misinformation in the tags is making me insane. leprosy? caused by bacteria! and not actually that contagious! tuberculosis? bacterial! bubonic plague? also bacterial!! if you want an early viral infection smallpox is right there! polio! hell, even influenza! bacteria ≠ viruses!
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Another day, another dollar trying to infect this host! Rise and grind pathogens 💸
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might fuck around and reactivate my oncogenes later
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Who up patrolling the body for cells without MHC Class I molecules 😎😎
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You know what? This isn't okay.
Pathogens work hard to infect host cells and reproduce. It's the only way for them to perpetuate their own existence. Letting pathogens infect host cells is absolutely necessary to prevent their total extermination. Killing is wrong! Immune cells need to learn to be tolerant of other microbes instead of destroying us just because we want to seize and consume this body's resources.
When it comes to genetics, there's always more than one way to encode a peptide. There are 4 nucleotides which allow for 64 different 3 letter combinations. There are, however, only 20 amino acids (and also start and end codons). This allows for some flexibility in what codon gets used more within a genome. GC content within a genome is correlated with the tRNA that's expressed within the cell that can act as a mechanism for control of gene expression.
There are only a few states that have declared an official microbe. Each of them obviously has significance to the state; most were discovered within their official state or are industrially important. Illinois chose Penicillium rubens which is responsible for producing penicillin, the first antibiotic.
The reason that it was chosen for Illinois is that the first strain with any decent yield was discovered on a moldy cantaloupe at a market in Peoria, which just happened to be near a lab that was working on increasing yields (initial strains had such low yields that the urine of treated patients was filtered to reclaim any traces of penicillin left).
Also, the species name is a little bit of a touchy subject here, which actually occurs pretty frequently with microbes.
Poxviruses are some of the most well studied viruses out there, but there's still a lot to learn about these little bricks. Entomopoxviruses infect insects, and are not yet well understood, with only a few genomes fully sequenced. The host range is also not quite clear, with the most well characterised viruses infecting Lepidoptera species, but there are also reports out there about cockroaches and bumblebees having their own poxviruses.
The main reason for studying these viruses right now is for use in biocontrol of agricultural pests. Using viruses to control populations of insects can help decrease the need for heavy usage of chemical pesticides that have a broader effect on local wildlife.
Choristoneura biennis (two-year budworm) is a species of moth which defoliates spruce and fir trees in the Canadian rocky mountains. These moth larvae cause damage by eating away at the buds of the tree, and stands of trees take a long time to recover. Epidemics of defoliation occur about every 30 years and last around ten years, usually resulting in double the loss of trees as in non-epidemic years. Attempts to minimize the occurence of these outbreaks by using baculovirus have been made, and supplementing the use of baculovirus with entomopoxvirus which doesn't work as quickly could be a way to minimize the impact of this budworm without decimating the local insect population.
When it comes to complex ecosystems, most people would picture any number of things before this:
Stromatolites are made up of layers of matted bacteria that grow by precipitation of materials onto the surface. That means that stromatolites are essentially a special kind of biofilm that builds up over time, very similarly to how coral reefs develop.
A lot of bacteria live in these structures, and for a long time cyanobacteria were thought to be the main component because it's very easy to identify through microscopy, and most wild bacteria won't grow in lab conditions. They are also more abundant on the surface, which is generally easier to reach and lets them get more light.
Unfortunately stromatolites are now much less abundant than they were 600 million years ago due to grazing by multicellular organisms. Today they tend to be found only in shallow saline areas like Shark Bay in western Australia.
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