Virus In Mummy May Rewrite Smallpox History

The discovery of smallpox DNA in a 17^th century child mummy may shorten the timeline of the deadly infectious diseases history, according to a study published on 8 December. Specimens of the smallpox causing variola virus now exist only in secured laboratory freezers. The highly contagious and sometimes fatal disease was eradicated in the late 1970s through a worldwide vaccination campaign. But the origins of the virus remain unknown. The discovery of the smallpox virus within the DNA of the mummy child, found in a crypt underneath a Lithuanian church, could shed light on how it began and developed, researchers said in the study published in the US scientific journal Current Biology. There have been signs that Egyptian mummies that are 3,000 to 4,000 years old have pock-marked scarring that have been interpreted as cases of smallpox. The new discoveries really throw those findings into question, and they suggest that the timeline of smallpox in human populations might be incorrect. The researchers reconstructed the genome of the ancient strain of the virus and compared it with versions of the variola virus genome dating from the mid-1900s and before its eradication.