Chickenpox has largely disappeared from the public’s memory thanks to a highly effective vaccine. But the virus’s clever life cycle allows it to reappear in later adulthood in the form of shingles.
Today smallpox can only be found in deep freeze inside a few highly secured laboratories, like this one at the CDC in 1980.
CDC
The smallpox virus appears to have been with humanity for millennia before a global vaccination drive wiped it out. Current genome research suggests how smallpox spread and where it came from.
Associate Member, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Affiliate Associate Professor of Genome Sciences and Microbiology, University of Washington