Child Mummy Found With Oldest Known Smallpox Virus
“The most terrible of all the ministers of death” may have started afflicting humans in the 1500s, altering our understanding of the disease.
Picture of mummy
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One of several naturally mummified bodies found in a church in Lithuania. The preserved partial body of a child found in the same crypt contains the oldest known sample of smallpox virus.
Photograph by Kiril Cachovskij, Delfi
By Maryn McKenna
PUBLISHED December 8, 2016
It devastated cities, stalled the growth of empires, and shuffled the leadership of royal houses like a handful of playing cards. A historian called it “the most terrible of all the ministers of death.”
Smallpox was stealthy and relentless, disfiguring and deadly, so traumatizing that it was the first disease for which a vaccine was sought and achieved, and the first that humankind eradicated.
It was the most feared illness in history—but now an achievement of molecular genetics is raising questions about whether our understanding of that history is correct.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/12/mummies-smallpox-virus-dna-lithuania-health-science/
