Attention was refocused on smallpox in the early 1990s after a Soviet defector told US authorities that Moscow had a big bio-warfare program, including smallpox. Fears within the US administration were heightened following wide circulation of The Cobra Event, a fictional account of a bio-terrorist attack on New York. The book, published in the late-1990s, mentions smallpox as a real threat. A small UK biotechnology company, Peptide Therapeutics of Cambridge, will make a stockpile of smallpox vaccine to be used on civilians if the virus is ever released. Plans are under way to produce a separate batch for the military.
Peptide plans to market the vaccine to other governments, including Israel.
Smallpox is highly infectious, fatal in a third of cases. It is estimated to have killed 500m people in the first 75 years of the 20th century. The disease was eradicated using a modified form of a vaccine developed by Edward Jenner, a British scientist, in 1796. Jenner made a vaccine using scabs from the hands of milkmaids after noticing that they rarely suffered from the facial scarring associated with smallpox. The disease probably resided in cow udders.