DL-950: Smallpox, 2 CE

Helen Sowers, MA, CLS - California State University, East Bay (Retired) Approved for 2.0 CE Level of Difficulty: Basic CAMLT is approved by the California Department of Public Health as a CA CLS Accrediting Agency (#21) Smallpox, once called “The most terrible of all the ministers of death” (Macaulay) was declared eradicated in 1980 by the World Health Organization (WHO). The last case of person to person transmission had occurred in Oct., 1977. However, stocks of the smallpox virus were still held by several countries. By the mid 1980s only the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and the Ivanovsky Institute of Virology in Moscow still had smallpox stock. Who would have imagined that smallpox now is a bioweapon threat? How has this terrible specter come about?