Researchers Digitize Records From World's Last Natural Smallpox Outbreaks

Researchers have digitized historic records from the world's last naturally occurring smallpox outbreaks, creating an open dataset for future epidemiological and disease-modelling research. The project was led by Rabia Khan, a DPhil student in Sara Khalid's Planetary Health Informatics group at the Botnar Institute for Musculoskeletal Sciences and a principal epidemiologist at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), working with the World Health Organization and the University of Manchester. The findings are published in the journal Scientific Data in a paper titled "Digitization of Historical Data from Somalia's Last Smallpox Outbreaks 1976-1977."

Smallpox is a serious, contagious and often fatal viral disease that plagued humans for thousands of years before it was declared eradicated in 1980 following a global vaccination and surveillance programme. It remains relevant to global health security, however, because routine vaccination ended after eradication, meaning much of today's population has never been vaccinated. Preserving detailed data from the final outbreaks allows researchers to better understand how the disease spread and to model how a future outbreak could be contained.

The team digitized and curated WHO records from the last naturally occurring outbreaks of variola minor smallpox, in Somalia in 1976-77. The original records were contained in more than 500 pages of scanned historic documents that were unsuitable for automated text extraction and required careful manual transcription and validation.

The resulting dataset contains individual-level information on 3,255 smallpox cases, including age, sex, dates of rash onset and detection, and geographic and outbreak details. The data have been anonymised and made openly available through the UK Data Service ReShare repository.

"By making these records accessible, we have created a resource that can be used to reconstruct the final outbreaks, investigate patterns of disease transmission and develop infectious disease models," Khan said.