Smallpox virus DNA detected in 300-year-old Siberian mummy

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Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/science/...,2516682.story

Smallpox virus detected in 300-year-old Siberian mummy
By Eryn Brown Los Angeles Times

November 21, 2012, 2:15 p.m.

Thanks to vaccination efforts, smallpox ? killer of hundreds of millions people around the world over the course of the 20th century alone ? was eradicated in 1979. But even today the lethal variola virus, which causes the disease, is not completely impossible to come by.

A team of French and Russian researchers recently found new snippets of smallpox DNA in 300-year-old mummies from Siberia, according to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine released Wednesday...

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Re: Smallpox virus detected in 300-year-old Siberian mumm

The article also contains the text below, indicating that the mummy was not an infectious risk:

Genetic analysis also showed that only snippets of DNA from the new strain, called PoxSib, remained and that no intact viral particles had survived.