Vaccinia
For several hundred years, a type of pox virus known as vaccinia has been saving lives. Today it is still proving useful to medicine - The Economist
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No One Knows What’s Inside the Smallpox Vaccine
No one knows where vaccinia came from in nature. No one has ever found its animal reservoir. No one knows quite what vaccinia is—even as it has been used to inoculate billions of people and saved hundreds of millions of lives. It is a ghost of a virus that has survived by being turned into a vaccine...
Vaccinia remains a mystery because it arose before the advent of a modern, regulated pharmaceutical industry. No one kept careful records; even if they did, they wouldn’t have known what to record. It all happened before anyone had an understanding of germ theory. It happened even before the discovery of viruses. Remarkably, the vaccine worked. And it worked so well that we were able…
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A poxy story
For several hundred years, a type of pox virus known as vaccinia has been saving lives. Today it is still proving useful to medicine.
The mystery virus that protects against monkeypox
The vaccine being used to prevent monkeypox is made from a lost virus that no one has ever been able to identify. How has this happened? And could it still exist in the wild?
The virus of the month: Vaccinia virus
The vaccinia virus is a much less dangerous relative of smallpox. In fact, it was the distant relative used for smallpox eradication. While smallpox killed around one in three infected, a rash and fever are the worst a healthy person might expect from a vaccinia virus infection. Although Edward Jenner used cowpox to immunize a 9-year-old boy against smallpox in 1796, the vaccinia virus (whose origin remains somewhat mysterious) ultimately became the basis for the smallpox vaccine.
Virus That Beat Smallpox Is Recalled to Battle
LIKE a veteran soldier coming out of retirement to be retrained for new battles, vaccinia virus, the most successful vaccine ever developed, is being remodeled for uses that could never have been imagined by the man who first used it. Vaccinia, the vaccine that conquered smallpox, has become a subject of great new interest for reasons that have nothing to do with that dreaded and now extinct disease.
Articles of Interest
Emergence and Reemergence of Vaccinia-Like Viruses: Global Scenario and Perspectives
Among the members of the genus Orthopoxvirus (OPXV), vaccinia virus (VACV), the type species of the genus is a double-stranded DNA virus, belongs to the subfamily Chordopoxvirinae of the family Poxviridae. The causative agents of smallpox, VACV and Variola virus are mutually immunogenic and the type species of Orthopoxvirus, cause only mild complications in humans.
Fighting Cancer with Vaccinia Virus: Teaching New Tricks to an Old Dog
Vaccinia virus has played a huge part in human beings' victory over smallpox. With smallpox being eradicated and large-scale vaccination stopped worldwide, vaccinia has assumed a new role in our fight against another serious threat to human health: cancer.
Vaccinia Virus Vaccines: Past, Present and Future
Vaccinia virus (VACV) has been used more extensively for human immunization than any other vaccine. For almost two centuries, VACV was employed to provide cross-protection against variola virus, the causative agent of smallpox, until the disease was eradicated in the late 1970s. Since that time, continued research on VACV has produced a number of modified vaccines with improved safety profiles.
Resources
ScienceDirect
Vaccinia virus is the most intensively studied species in the genus Orthopoxvirus of the family Poxviridae, and several VACV strains have been sequenced.
