Smallpox requires bed bugs to spread significantly. It is not normally spread person to person.
Good bed and furniture sanitation controls it.
“It is not normally spread person to person.”
Maybe it could be controlled.
But this article says that it can spread by air when a person is coughing and sitting in a doctor’s office or subway station.
When a full blown case is in the hospital, everyone in the hospital is at risk.
“Variola [plague] virus is now classified as a Biosafety Level 4 hot agent — the most dangerous kind of virus — because it is lethal, airborne, and highly contagious, and is now exotic to the human species, and there is not enough vaccine to stop an outbreak. Experts feel that the appearance of a single case of smallpox anywhere on earth would be a global medical emergency. “
http://cryptome.org/smallpox-wmd.htm
No, you're thinking of something else. Smallpox is an aerosol spreader. Those stories Ward Churchill (remember him?) used to write about infected blankets giving smallpox to the Indians were pure fantasy, it doesn't work like that.
The real difficulty is twofold: (1) we don't have stockpiles of vaccine against the normal, wild type of Variola, and (2) nobody has much of anything against the weaponized type except presumably for the guys who produce it because they're the only ones who know what modifications were made. Nasty, nasty stuff - very low threshold dose, some people even claim one virus particle but that would be impossible to determine with any degree of confidence. The variation in immunity you see in a normal population may not be the case with the weaponized versions - think Ebola and you'll get the picture. The stuff is very adept at picking up pieces of the host genome, which is why it's so attractive to bio-warfare.
Good sanitation practices can certainly restrict its spread, though, especially if the cordon is tight enough and the infected population small enough. But I do think that even if the conventional vaccine confers only a partial immunity, it's worth producing in usable quantities. Just my $0.02.