Crossword clues for smallpox
smallpox
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Smallpox \Small"pox`\, n. [Small + pox, pocks.] (Med.) A contagious, constitutional, febrile disease characterized by a peculiar eruption; variola. The cutaneous eruption is at first a collection of papules which become vesicles (first flat, subsequently umbilicated) and then pustules, and finally thick crusts which slough after a certain time, often leaving a pit, or scar.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. (context pathology English) An acute, highly infectious often fatal disease caused by (taxlink Variola virus species noshow=1) of the family ''Poxviridae''. It was completely eradicated in the 1970s. Those who survived were left with pockmarks.
WordNet
n. a highly contagious viral disease characterized by fever and weakness and skin eruption with pustules that form scabs that slough off leaving scars [syn: variola, variola major]
Wikipedia
Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. The disease is also known by the Latin names Variola or Variola vera, derived from varius ("spotted") or varus ("pimple"). The disease was originally known in English as the "pox" or "red plague"; the term "smallpox" was first used in Britain in the 15th century to distinguish variola from the "great pox" ( syphilis). The last naturally occurring case of smallpox (Variola minor) was diagnosed on 26 October 1977.
Infection with smallpox is focused in small blood vessels of the skin and in the mouth and throat before disseminating. In the skin it results in a characteristic maculopapular rash and, later, raised fluid-filled blisters. V. major produced a more serious disease and had an overall mortality rate of 30–35 percent. V. minor caused a milder form of disease (also known as alastrim, cottonpox, milkpox, whitepox, and Cuban itch) which killed about 1 percent of its victims. Long-term complications of V. major infection included characteristic scars, commonly on the face, which occur in 65–85 percent of survivors. Blindness resulting from corneal ulceration and scarring, and limb deformities due to arthritis and osteomyelitis were less common complications, seen in about 2–5 percent of cases.
Smallpox is believed to have emerged in human populations about 10,000 BC. The earliest physical evidence of it is probably the pustular rash on the mummified body of Pharaoh Ramses V of Egypt. The disease killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans annually during the closing years of the 18th century (including five reigning monarchs), and was responsible for a third of all blindness. Of all those infected, 20–60 percent—and over 80 percent of infected children—died from the disease. Smallpox was responsible for an estimated 300–500 million deaths during the 20th century. As recently as 1967, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 15 million people contracted the disease and that two million died in that year.
After vaccination campaigns throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the WHO certified the global eradication of smallpox in 1979. Smallpox is one of two infectious diseases to have been eradicated, the other being rinderpest, which was declared eradicated in 2011.
Usage examples of "smallpox".
It was there, in Boston, that smallpox inoculation had been introduced in America more than half a century earlier, and by a kinsman of Adams, Dr.
Field in Philadelphia the previous April, Adams had been overcome by the thought that more than 2,000 American soldiers had already been buried there, nearly all victims of smallpox and camp diseases.
In a little over a hundred years it has reduced smallpox from the commonest and most fatal of all diseases to one of the rarest.
The example she used was of the development of smallpox vaccine using cowpox by Jenner.
In 1798, however, an English country doctor named Edward Jenner proved that inoculation with a related but nonfatal virus called cowpox could protect against smallpox, offering hope for the first time that the disease could be stemmed.
Two of those other patients were suffering from cowpox contracted to protect them against smallpox.
Author Note Shortly after the smallpox epidemic in the fall of 1876, the Deadwood Board of Health and Street Commissioners made themselves into a real city council and began the process of turning the town into a diverse community that, through the years, has retained the flavor of those early wild West days.
About five thousand types of virus are known, and between them they afflict us with many hundreds of diseases, ranging from the flu and common cold to those that are most invidious to human well-being: smallpox, rabies, yellow fever, ebola, polio, and the human immunodeficiency virus, the source of AIDS.
I could have had tuberculosis or anthrax or smallpox, I could have had encephalitis lethargica, better known as sleeping sickness.
Down at Montpellier, Gilbert, the Englishman, suggested red light for smallpox because it shortened the fever, lessened the lesions, and made the disfigurement much less.
It is the first time we see him alone in quite a spell, and finally, Ambrose Hammer asks where is Fergus Appleton, although Ambrose really does not care where he is, unless it happens to turn out that he is in a pesthouse suffering from smallpox.
Smallpox had appeared among the prisoners, and I believed that this would prove an admirable field for the establishment of its characteristic lesions.
American control, the maritime quarantine was conducted upon a basis of graft, with the inevitable result that an outbreak of any dangerous communicable disease, like plague, cholera or smallpox, in the nearby foreign countries, meant the early introduction of the disease into the Philippines.
God is my witness that in Holy Week I went to a poor girl with the smallpox, and touched her in the hope of catching it, and so losing my beauty.
The reaction began within hours, the swelling and fever and the vomiting, and she went out into the other deserted barracoons to gather more of the loathsome pus from the bodies of those who had survived the smallpox and were now dying of starvation and neglect, resigning herself to the fact that she had only the strength and time to care for those in Huron's barracoons, resigning herself to the fact that there was farina to feed them only, and closing her mind to the cries and entreaty, to the silent dying stare from wizened faces that streamed pus from open pocks.