Editorial The eradication of smallpox, a success story for modern medicine and

Copyright © 2010 Tognotti et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Thirty years ago, on 8 May 1980, the World Health Organization certified that smallpox had been eradicated globally [1,12]. For the first time in history, mankind had conquered a disease. It was certainly the greatest achievement of twentieth century medicine [2]. Smallpox, a devastating, highly contagious disease [3,13], was caused by either of two virus variants named Variola major and Variola minor. Historical and epidemiological evidence suggests that South Asia was home to the more virulent strain of the disease, variola major, which sometimes mutated into the deadly haemorrhagic form of smallpox