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curl-6 on 19 May 2019
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John2290 said:
curl-6 said:

If the measure for success or failure is survival then every disease is a success except for the two we've so far exterminated; Smallpox and Rinderpest. Polio and Guinea Worm are on the brink but the last isolated pockets are proving the hardest to finish off due to factors like danger to health workers, lack of accessibility, and poor infrastructure in the remaining few endemic countries.

I hear smallpox is held in government facilities, it may make a come back and if I am Pilgrim is any indication, in quite a big way, it'll be partying out the gates of those faciloties until we are complete failures. 

Smallpox samples are indeed kept in high security labs in both the US and Russia, yes. And if it ever did get loose, yeah it would be absolutely catastrophic. Aside from military personnel nobody is vaccinated against it anymore, and we know from history that when Smallpox breaks out in an unvaccinated population the result is utter carnage. (See the native populations of the Americas in the years following contact with Europeans)

That said, we do at least have a working vaccine against it, but probably nowhere near enough of it stockpiled to stem a global pandemic, unless we are able to quickly isolate it in the very early stages, like when ten or less people are infected, quarantine those people, and vaccinate all their contacts.

I honestly wouldn't worry about it though, of all the things that could kill millions of people in the foreseeable future, there are many more probable threats than Smallpox, scary as it is.

Last edited by curl-6 - on 19 May 2019