Preventing the Return of Smallpox

Abstract

The World Health Organization (WHO), concerned especially with helping low-income countries that have a poor health infrastructure, is focusing on increasing the global supply of smallpox vaccine and strengthening international capabilities for surveillance, diagnosis, and response.3 -6 In the event of a smallpox outbreak, all countries would investigate and try to contain the outbreak with their own public health and medical services, most of whose personnel are unvaccinated; these public health systems are also facing huge numbers of patients with malaria, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection or AIDS, tuberculosis, and other diseases.