Responsible for serious epidemics in past centuries, smallpox is a disease completely eradicated on a global scale since 1979, thanks to mass vaccination campaigns that lasted over two centuries.
The last 400 specimens of the smallpox virus are stored in US and Russian laboratories designated by the WHO, in order to allow further research (the complete coding of the genome is recent) and to be able to react adequately to sudden resurgence of the disease with new vaccines and medicines . Furthermore, these drugs may prove useful against other viruses of the same family. In some African countries, for example, the end of vaccination against diseases has coincided with an exponential increase in cases of monkey pox, a disease caused by the Monkeypox virus structurally related to the viral agent that causes human smallpox and is responsible for a similar disease.
There is also the increased concern that the smallpox virus can be used as a biological weapon in terrorist attacks, also due to the possibility that the pathogen can be easily recreated by synthesis. The natural micro-organism would therefore serve to produce more quickly the quantity of vaccine needed, the administration of which, a mandatory time, has been definitively suspended for several years.
