Deja Vu

Killing the Killer

Tags:

health care,

medicine,

smallpox

2011: How the mighty have fallen. Smallpox, which has killed hundreds of millions dating back to pre-history, is on its last legs. The World Health Organization is renewing the debate over weather to destroy the last remaining samples of the once-feared virus:

Two labs possess the last known live samples of the variola virus — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and a Russian facility in Siberia. Officials in developing nations, where smallpox is more likely to spread should it resurface, have been pushing for their destruction since 1980. The World Health Assembly decided to kill the samples in 1996, but they have been granted stays of execution in the decade and a half since, with the United States, Russia and others arguing the virus samples could seed new vaccines and potential treatments for infected patients.

In January, WHO officials again started discussions about whether to destroy the samples. The World Health Assembly will decide in May…

Officials in the U.S. and Russia have said they will fight efforts to set a destruction date, arguing the viruses are needed for research and to guard against bioterrorism. Some fear nations like North Korea or Iran may possess secret samples, although those countries deny it.

c. 900: It would be hard to underestimate smallpox's effect on humanity as a species. It has been with us for millennia, knowing no borders and showing mercy on no creed. The earliest definitive recognition of the disease comes from Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi, a Persian doctor and alchemist. In his al-Judari wa al-Hasbah (On Smallpox and Measles), al-Razi writes of smallpox's symptoms, which would come to haunt tens of millions innocent victims in the years to come:

The eruption of the Small-Pox is preceded by a continued fever, pain in the back, itching in the nose, and terrors in sleep. These are the more peculiar symptoms of its approach, especially a pain in the back, with fever; then also a pricking which the patient feels all over his body; a fullness of the face, which at times goes and comes; an inflamed color, and vehement redness in both the cheeks, a redness of both the eyes, a heaviness of the whole body; great uneasiness, the symptoms of which are stretching and yawning; a pain in the throat and chest, with a slight difficulty in breathing, and cough; a dryness of the mouth, thick spittle, and hoarseness of the voice; pain and heaviness of the head; inquietude, distress of mind, nausea, and anxiety; (with this difference, that the inquietude, nausea, and anxiety are more frequent in the Measles than in the Small-Pox; while, on the other hand, the pain in the back is more peculiar to the Small-Pox than to the Measles;) heat of the whole body, an inflamed color, and shining redness, and especially an intense redness of the gums.

When, therefore, you see these symptoms, or some of the worst of them, (such as the pain of the back, and the terrors in sleep, with the continued fever,) then you may be assured that the eruption of one or other of these diseases in the patient is nigh at hand; except that there is not in the Measles so much pain of the back as in the Small-Pox; nor in the smallpox so much anxiety and nausea as in the Measles, unless the Small-Pox be of a bad sort; and this shows that the Measles come from a very bilious blood.

With respect to the safer kind of the Small-Pox, in this it is the quantity of the blood that is hurtful rather than its bad quality; and hence arises the pain of the back, from the distension of the large vein and artery which are situated by the vertebrae of the spine.

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