60 Fun Facts About Smallpox

Smallpox holds what unique distinction among human diseases?

A commission of scientists certified its global eradication in December 1979.

Smallpox was caused by a virus of which genus?

Its relatives include cowpox, vaccinia and monkeypox.

The risk of death from smallpox was roughly what?

Rates were higher among babies, and many survivors were left scarred or blind.

The characteristic smallpox blister had what distinctive feature?

The blisters scabbed over and fell off, leaving the pitted scars known as pockmarks.

Unlike chickenpox, the smallpox rash usually appeared on which parts of the body?

The rash was densest on the face and on the hands and feet rather than the trunk.

Smallpox spread from person to person mainly through what?

Contaminated objects such as bedding could rarely transmit it too.

The milder form of the disease, variola minor, was also known by what name?

It killed 1% or less of those infected, against roughly a third for variola major.

Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to how many people in the 20th century?

About 500 million died in the disease's final hundred years.

In 18th-century Europe roughly how many people died of smallpox each year?

A third of all blindness on the continent was blamed on the disease.

The name "smallpox" was coined in 16th-century England to distinguish it from which "great pox"?

Older names included the red plague and simply "the pox".

Which of these was a historical nickname for smallpox?

The others were names for a Tudor fever, tuberculosis and scrofula.

Pockmarks on the mummy of which pharaoh, who died around 1145 BCE, are among the earliest physical evidence of smallpox?

Written descriptions from ancient India may go back even further.

Which epidemic that swept the Roman Empire from 165 to 180 CE may have been smallpox?

Scholars doubt earlier Mediterranean plagues were smallpox because Hippocrates never described it.

Which saint became the patron of smallpox victims after supposedly surviving a bout in 450?

Roch and Sebastian were invoked against plague instead.

Which 9th-century Persian physician wrote the first work clearly distinguishing smallpox from measles?

His Book of Smallpox and Measles remained a standard text for centuries.

Which Aztec ruler of Tenochtitlan died of smallpox in 1520, shortly after the disease reached the Americas?

He had ruled for only about 80 days after Moctezuma's death.

The 1527 smallpox death of which Inca emperor triggered a civil war that eased the Spanish conquest?

His sons Atahualpa and Huascar fought over the succession.

In 1763 blankets from a smallpox infirmary were handed to Delaware delegates besieging which British stronghold?

The commander, Henry Bouquet, ordered his subordinate Simeon Ecuyer to make the gift.

Which British commander wrote in 1763, "Could it not be contrived to send the small pox among the disaffected tribes of Indians?"

A Massachusetts town and college still bear his name.

Which French king died of smallpox in 1774?

He had reached the throne only because smallpox and measles carried off those ahead of him in the succession.

Which English queen, joint sovereign with William III, died of smallpox?

Other royal victims included Emperor Joseph I of Austria and Tsar Peter II.

Which Tudor monarch survived smallpox in 1562?

Her half-sister Mary had survived it in 1527.

George Washington caught smallpox in 1751 while visiting which island?

President Andrew Jackson also caught and survived the disease.

In 1775 George Washington ordered which body to be inoculated against smallpox?

Inoculation with live smallpox was risky, but far less so than an epidemic in camp.

Which US president was quarantined with smallpox shortly after giving a famous 1863 speech?

He may have caught it from his son Tad.

Which Soviet leader fell ill with smallpox at the age of seven?

The disease left him with a pockmarked face.

Which Japanese warlord lost an eye to smallpox?

He was known as the One-Eyed Dragon.

Which Hindu goddess of smallpox was worshipped in temples across India?

At least seven deities worldwide were dedicated to the disease, including Sopona of the Yoruba.

Inoculation with live smallpox to prevent severe disease appears to have begun around the 1500s in which country?

Europe adopted the practice from Asia in the early 18th century.

The Boston minister Cotton Mather learned of inoculation from whom?

Mather inoculated hundreds during Boston's 1721 outbreak, to fierce opposition.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought smallpox inoculation to Britain after seeing it practised where?

She had her four-year-old daughter inoculated before the court physicians in 1721.

In 1721 six condemned inmates of which London prison were inoculated and exposed to smallpox in return for a promise of freedom?

All survived, and the experiment helped win over the royal family.

The earlier practice of inoculating people with smallpox itself was later renamed what, to distinguish it from vaccination?

The name comes from variola, the Latin name of the disease.

In which year did Edward Jenner inoculate the eight-year-old son of his gardener with cowpox?

He later exposed the boy to smallpox and no disease followed.

What was the name of the boy Jenner used for his first cowpox experiment?

He was case number 17 in Jenner's first paper; the word vaccine itself comes from vacca, Latin for cow.

The cow that gave Jenner's milkmaid her cowpox was called what?

Her hide hangs in the library of St George's medical school in London.

Genome sequencing shows the vaccinia virus in modern smallpox vaccines is most closely related to which animal pox?

British cowpox strains turn out to be the least closely related of all.

Which Dorset farmer inoculated his family with cowpox in 1774, more than twenty years before Jenner?

He noticed that the two milkmaids living with his family never caught smallpox.

Besides medicine, Edward Jenner was elected to the Royal Society in 1788 for his study of which bird?

He showed that the newly hatched chick, not the adult, pushes the host's eggs from the nest.

The Spanish Balmis Expedition of 1803 kept the vaccine alive on its Atlantic crossing by passing it through whom?

It went on to vaccinate hundreds of thousands across Spanish America and the Philippines.

Which Swiss canton became the first state in the world to make smallpox vaccination compulsory, in 1806?

Britain did not follow with an Act of Parliament until 1853.

Which country's deputy health minister persuaded the World Health Assembly in 1958 to back global eradication?

Viktor Zhdanov's proposal was accepted in 1959, but funding stayed at about $100,000 a year until 1967.

The intensified eradication campaign launched in 1967 set a ten-year goal known as what?

That year there were still some 15 million cases worldwide.

The strategy of finding each case and vaccinating everyone around it, which proved more effective than blanket immunisation of whole populations, is called what?

Czech epidemiologist Karel Raska championed the surveillance approach that underpinned it.

The two-pronged instrument used to deliver hundreds of millions of vaccinations was fashioned by Benjamin Rubin from what?

Rubin reckoned it delivered 200 million vaccinations a year in the campaign's final years.

Which American physician led the WHO Smallpox Eradication Unit from 1966?

He later spent 13 years as dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

The last natural case of the deadly variola major form, in 1975, was a three-year-old girl in which country?

Rahima Banu, from Bhola Island, was declared cured that November.

Ali Maow Maalin, the last person to catch smallpox naturally, in October 1977, was a hospital cook in which country?

He had received the vaccine, but it had failed to take.

Ali Maow Maalin later spent years as a vaccinator in the campaign against which other disease?

He died of malaria in 2013 while out vaccinating after the virus re-emerged.

Janet Parker, the last person to die of smallpox, in 1978, worked in which job?

The virus escaped from a laboratory at the University of Birmingham; the lab's head, Henry Bedson, took his own life.

In which year did the World Health Assembly formally declare smallpox eradicated?

A commission of scientists had certified eradication on 9 December 1979.

Rinderpest, the only non-human infectious disease ever eradicated (in 2011), affected which animals?

It was a relative of measles.

The two remaining official stocks of live variola virus are held at the CDC in Atlanta and at the VECTOR institute in which country?

Every research proposal on them must be approved by the WHO.

A 1971 outbreak of weaponised smallpox followed testing on Vozrozhdeniya Island in which body of water?

Mysterious deaths in the port of Aralsk alerted Soviet officials.

Which Japanese emperor died of smallpox in 1867, on the eve of the Meiji Restoration?

His son Meiji succeeded him and moved the court to Tokyo.

Which British doctor was invited to Russia in 1768 to inoculate Catherine the Great and her son?

He had published The present method of inoculating for the small-pox the year before.

Which drug did the FDA approve in July 2018 as the first treatment for smallpox?

Resistance-causing viral mutations have been known to arise during treatment.

Variola, vaccinia and cowpox are three of the four orthopoxviruses that infect humans. What is the fourth?

Variola alone infects only humans in nature; the smallpox vaccine is also given to prevent mpox.

The smallpox vaccine first reached the New World in 1800 at Trinity, in which territory?

Dr John Clinch brought it across; in Russia, Catherine the Great named the first vaccinated child 'Vaktsinov'.

Which form of smallpox, with bleeding under the skin that turned it charred and dark, was nicknamed 'black pox'?

Also called variola nigra, it was typically fatal; the Rao classification lists four types of the disease.