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A comment on FDA approves drug to treat smallpox. Parent comment

Re:FDA approves drug to treat smallpox by retrac on Friday June 11, 2021 @01:18AM (#27469571)
Vaccinia, the smallpox vaccine, is a very closely related virus. You infect someone with it, they maybe get a bad rash at worst, and then they are immune to many of the poxes. Cowpox can and has been used the same way, too. This is why vaccination is named after cows.

Some poxes are awful for the primary host. Camelpox apparently kills about a quarter of camels that contract it. Just like smallpox (humanpox?) kills about 25% of humans, actually. But camelpox rarely even infects humans, and is self-limiting when it does.

Monkeypox is bad in humans. Almost as bad as smallpox, but not as contagious.

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Re:FDA approves drug to treat smallpox by makomk on Friday June 11, 2021 @04:29AM (#27470696)
Speaking of which, guess what showed up in Wales recently? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-57431322

(This kind of thing is why the UK has national-level contract tracing capabilities. Occasionally something shows up that's not particularly easy to spread, but bad enough that it needs stopping sooner rather than later. I think we've had a few SARS and MERS cases too.)

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