Small Pox: Last case in Somalia Oct. 1997
The body exhibits similar effects of an oncoming cold, like malaise, maybe a high fever and head- and backaches, then a rash develops. Smallpox has already set in.
Kim Lundstrom, a registered nurse at the Bear River Health Department, said sores form in the mouth and facilitate the spread of disease through exhaled water vapor. Sores then form on the body and spread from the face to forearms and then to the trunk and legs.
Within one to two days, the sores become vesicular, meaning they are filled with fluid. Later the sores become pustular (pus-filled) and eventually crust over on or about the ninth day of infection.
When scabs fall off, pigment from the skin is erased from each sore’s location. Death, which is a welcome end to an overwhelming infection usually occurs about the second week of the illness if left untreated.
Fortunately, smallpox was officially declared eradicated May 8, 1980 by the World Health Assembly, Lundstrom said.
According to Control of Communicable Diseases Manual, a textbook used at Utah State University, the last naturally acquired case of smallpox in the world occurred in October 1997 in Somalia. Except for a laboratory associated death which occurred at the University of Birmingham, England, in 1978, no cases have been identified since.
All known variola (another name for the smallpox virus) stocks, are held under security at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta or the State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo, Novosibirsk Region, Russian Federation, according to the book.
The World Health Organization has an ultimate goal of destroying the remaining virus stocks by the end of 2002, and still needs to engage in more research to determine what needs to happen before the virus can be destroyed.
Lundstrom said a vaccine is available, but only to members of the armed forces and lab workers who work with it.
“Not just anyone can order it,” Lundstrom said.
She said the first smallpox vaccine was discovered in 1796 by Edward Jenner, who demonstrated a person inoculated and infected with cowpox was protected against smallpox. This was the first use of a vaccine in the prevention of a disease, according to Smallpox and Vaccinia, a text available from Bear River Health.
However, the first commercially feasible vaccine was perfected in the 1940s by Leslie Collier, who created a freeze-dried form of the vaccine which allowed the Pan-American Sanitary Organization to work on a hemisphere-wide eradication program.
“This led to a better possibility for control,” Lundstrom said.
By 1967, smallpox had been eliminated in all of South America except for Brazil.
Most smallpox used to be confused with chickenpox because the skin lesions commonly occur in successive crops with several stages of maturity at the same time, according to the textbook. However, the book makes the distinction that chickenpox is more abundant on covered than on exposed parts of the body and is centripetal, moving in, rather than centrifugal, moving out toward the extremities. For the most part, chickenpox lesions are superficial and smallpox lesions scar infected areas.