Comments

1
Go humans!
2
FOr more useless knowledge see the book chapter by Dobson, Holdo and Holt on the virus. Just google: encyclopedia of biological invasions rinderpest
3
But there have been some recent smallpox cases - so it's technically not eradicated, right? Unless their definition of eradication is different than most people's?
4
The main element of the photo is actually a single large mammalian cell, and that cell is stuffed with rinderpest virions--the rodlike, zipper-looking structures. The mature viruses will exit the cell and go on to infect adjacent cells or travel around in the bloodstream. The other large blobby structures (lakes, stadium, etc. are the cell's own organelles--nucleus, vacuoles, etc.) Viruses cause disease by entering cells and co-opting their molecular machinery, forcing the cells to make more virus copies out of the nutrients (amino acids, nucleic acid precursors, etc.) that are present, then bursting out like in Alien to wreak further havoc.
5
Re:4 What I came to say.

Also, Check out this cool lysis micrograph.
6
Clarification/correction @4: the zipperlike herringbone is specifically the nucleocapsid, which is made of repeating protein elements surrounding the virus-specific genetic material (in this case, single-stranded RNA).

Morbilliviruses are enveloped viruses--the nucleocapsids pick up more membrane structures with integrated proteins as they leave the infected cell. They're called "pleiomorphic," which means lots of different shapes and sizes, which is why I assumed the picture showed an infected cell rather than a discrete virus.

Here's a diagram of the very similar measles virus:

http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v4…

I know this is TMI, but viruses are amazing--essentially non-living things that travel around the world like a bunch of different keys that have the ability to find the locks they fit, and managing to reproduce by coercion.
7
Also, the guy who developed the vaccine most responsible for progress against the disease, Dr. Walter Plowright, was not mentioned in the NYT article and died early last year. I missed it at the time because I'm not in the virus racket anymore, but Plowright also did a lot of the early studies on a virus that was my primary focus for quite a while.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment…

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424…

/nerd
8
@4: THANK YOU. I was thinking, "that sure looks awfully membrane-encapsulated and eukaryotic to be a virus..."
9
Thanks 4, I thought the same thing... "that's some dog epithelial cell or whatnot packed with half-completed viral coat proteins." You can see how it destroys vulnerable tissues. Distemper is an awful awful disease.
10
@3 You are dead wrong. There was one case after the eradication and that was due to an accident in a lab that infected and killed one person. That particular accident is well studied and cited why all smallpox stores should be eliminated.

The last natural case was 1977, the accidental infection I mentioned was in 1978. Obvious troll is obvious.
11
It's not completely useless. It's important to remember that the past was different.
12
@10, glad to be wrong, definitely not a troll, not sure why you would call me that. I was remembering hearing something about reported cases in Uganda, but just looked them up and they had initially been suspected to be smallpox, but turned out to be chickenpox.

Also, yes, viruses are amazing! Carl Zimmer's book, Parasite Rex, discusses the kind of mushy border between what we consider viruses and what we consider parasites, and it's very readable.

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