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Joan Stephenson, PhD

JAMA. 2001;285:872-873.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

How do you study a disease that no longer exists?

That's the challenge facing researchers who want to develop new ways to treat and prevent smallpox, the devastating scourge that was eradicated from nature more than 20 years ago.

Researchers believe that genetic studies of smallpox, whose devastating effect is shown here, and other poxviruses will provide a springboard for developing drugs to treat the disease, as well as better vaccines to prevent infection. Smallpox is now only in laboratories. (Photo credit: World Health Organization)

While there have been no new cases of the disease since the late 1970s, isolates of variola, the smallpox virus, are stored in laboratories in Russia and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. With so many infectious diseases continuing to claim lives around the world, few people envisioned the need to continue devoting much attention to smallpox—at . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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