Talk:Smallpox

Smallpox has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
November 23, 2010	Good article nominee	Listed

This article has been mentioned by multiple media organizations:

"Gauthier: Fear factor". MetroWest Daily News. October 21, 2004.
Stephen Pinker (2018). "Hour 3 – Steven Pinker and Movie Reviews". The Michael Medved Show (subscription required).

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PubMed provides review articles from the past five years (limit to free review articles)
The TRIP database provides clinical publications about evidence-based medicine.
Other potential sources include: Centre for Reviews and Dissemination and CDC

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A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the On this day section on 10 dates. [show]

June 2, 2004, June 2, 2005, December 9, 2007, December 9, 2009, December 9, 2010, December 9, 2011, December 9, 2013, December 9, 2014, December 9, 2015, and December 9, 2017

Archives

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This page has archives. Sections older than 180 days may be automatically archived by when more than 8 sections are present.

Past tense

Opening sentence, shouldn't it be Smallpox was?

Also, an indefinite semiprotection seems unwarranted for the level of vandalism that it was attracting and given good IP contributions at the time. Can we give it another shot please? 220.210.184.229 (talk) 12:09, 29 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ditto as per above. Cooltrainer Hugh (talk) 00:24, 29 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The article alternates back and forth between past and present. SelectSplat (talk) 05:56, 13 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I would suggest that until we can confirm that all remaining samples of the virus have been destroyed, the article should be written in the present tense, because while it may eradicated in the larger world, the virus still exists. As long as the virus exists somewhere in the world, there is the potential, even if only a remote one, that it could reescape into the wild. Only when the virus no longer exists could it be considered completely extinct. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.233.207.101 (talk) 00:46, 22 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. The past tense comes across as "clever" and pretentious. Smallpox still exists in various places on earth, it's not like it's some thing that happened once in the past. It is a viral disease. – Acdx (talk) 23:40, 12 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I don't accept that past tense would be '"clever" and pretentious'. Chris Jefferies (talk) 08:48, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, but much of the article is about symptoms and prognosis, including words like 'usually' - this makes no sende when there are currently no cases of infection. 173.254.200.130 (talk) 14:18, 14 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. I propose converting the article to a consistent past tense. Chris Jefferies (talk) 08:48, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Organization of the lead

I suggest to follow the flow of the whole article (general intro. & symptoms before causes, diagnosis, prevention, treatments and epidemiology ), as do in many other disease-related articles. Biomedicinal (talk)

If i will need a picture of a disease effect on human i will find it without wikipedia.

Can you please remove NSFW title picture? This is very ugly and inappropriate. All such pictures need to be put in a special section in all ilnesses articles. Thx. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.34.142.117 (talk) 07:52, 12 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is not censored. If you do not want to see images, possibly helpful instructions are located here. Regards, Xenophrenic (talk) 18:14, 12 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

This is an article about a disease, if people are squeamish about seeing pictures of the effects what are they doing looking looking it up in the first place? Czarnibog (talk) 22:20, 14 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestion

Would it be practical to have an image of a smallpox sufferer similar to that at the top of the chickenpox article at the top here, and move the other, more graphic, images further down the page? Thus those passing through (eg with the mention of smallpox on today's MP) will be less disconcerted on first coming to the page and skimming the intro - and they then have the choice of going further. Jackiespeel (talk) 11:47, 9 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 16 December 2017

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

Please read and edit this article for grammar mistakes. The first section has several, such as using "than" instead of "then," and the use of the wrong tense. I would change it myself but I'm not authorized to do so. Thanks. 2601:483:4100:3380:4493:CEF6:BD97:A3DF (talk) 15:10, 16 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Done DRAGON BOOSTER ★ 16:18, 16 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Evolution under section Cause instead of History?

I was looking for that info, and knew it was in the article (because I wrote part of the section), and considered the evolutionary history to be part of History. Maybe instead of Evolution, the section should be renamed Origin, that makes it clear it's part of History. The 'Cause' of smallpox is the virus as it exists today, or at least has existed for a couple thousand years including diversification in the middle ages. Sbalfour (talk) 20:52, 24 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Under Disease emergence, we have "The earliest credible clinical evidence of smallpox is <some pox disease in 2nd millenium BC in India>." Since the study by Duggan et.al. in 2016 isolating a basal strain of the virus dated ~1650, it's clear that variola has not historically been the virus we consider the causative agent of smallpox today. How sure are we that pre-middleages poxes were smallpox? That basal strain wasn't Variola major or Variola minor. Sbalfour (talk) 21:30, 24 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Capitalize genus names?

Shouldn't variola major and variola minor in the lead be Variola major and Variola minor? We also have Variola major and Variola minor in the article. Someone should go thru check and fix all of these. MOS: Capitalize scientific names above the rank of species, and italicize them from the rank of genus downward. Sbalfour (talk) 21:39, 24 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Number of people killed

For a book I'm writing I researched the claim that "in the 20th century it is estimated that smallpox resulted in 300–500 million deaths". Wikipedia and newspapers will quote this figure, claiming "one group of experts" or "some experts" estimate this. But I haven't found any single expert actually estimating this. The sources provided in the article are not medical or disease experts, but politics books and the like. And they all claim "it is estimated", they don't include any real estimations.

Still, I think I know where the figure comes from. D. A. Henderson was the guy in charge of smallpox eradication at the WHO. In two separate places he once estimates that in the 20th century 200-300 million people were killed and in the last century of the existence of smallpox 'at least half a billion'.

1st figure is in Donald A. Henderson, “Smallpox Eradication,” in Microbe Hunters - Then and Now, ed. M. D. Hilary Koprowski and M. D. Michael B. A. Oldstone, 1 edition (Bloomington, Ill: Medi-Ed Pr, 1996), 39.

2nd figure is in D. A. Henderson and Richard Preston, Smallpox: The Death of a Disease - The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer, 1st edition (Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 2009).

So, yeah, I think that needs changing. Thanks, Lilchimy (talk) 14:08, 20 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

OK I fixed it. Rjensen (talk) 14:35, 20 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Okay have formatted the new refs. Could not find the estimate in the WHO ref so removed it http://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/39485 Thanks User:Lilchimy Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:04, 20 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

User:Doc James and User:Rjensen, it's back to 300-500 and the other references don't hold up: The CDC website doesn't say it and the other is a book about international relations, which I don't think should be our main source of info on epidemiology. I think the soundest formulation would be: "It is estimated that smallpox resulted in 200-300 million deaths in the 20th century (REF 1st figure) and at least 500 million deaths in the last 100 years of its existence.(REF 2nd figure) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lilchimy (talk • contribs) 09:53, 23 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

User:Doc James and User:Rjensen, I edited it with my proposal. Lilchimy (talk) 01:26, 23 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]