This article seems to ring true with what I remember from my childhood in the the 50s and 60s and from what I know about how the immune system works. Once your systems makes an antibody, then my understanding is that you remain "hard wired" to make that antibody in the future if needed. There are exceptions, of course, if your immune system is damaged in some way. And it is true that if many decades pass without a need for that antibody, then the old immunice system may be a little rusty and slow to respond. But my understanding is that unless the virus mutates (thus making the antibody ineffective), a healthy system should still be capable of responding with antibodies. It is the tendency of viruses to mutate that most commonly requires new vaccination. The influenza virus mutates rapidly enough to require annual vaccinations, while the common cold exists in so many different mutant forms that it is not feasible to develop a vaccine at all, given that it is a relatively mild disease. HIV also mutates at a rapid rate, which is a major reason why we haven't seen an HIV vaccine yet. Many other viral diseases mutate very slowly, yet as long as they are present in human populations, even at low rates of infection, some mutation is possible. Thus, there are a number of viral diseases for which one should be vaccinated at ten year intervals.
Since smallpox has not been an active infection in human populations since the mid 1970s, if terrorists were to start a new epidemic with some of the stored samples, we might presume the virus to be unchanged from what was active earlier. Thus, those immune systems that had been vacinated back when that same virus was active should be just as capable now of producing antibodies as they were back then.
This would tend to suggest that this article is right: those of us who were vaccinated when we were younger might indeed still carry in our immune systems the ability to make antibodies should we become infected. Because the immune system is old and rusty, it cannot be guaranteed that wouldn't become sick at all. But it should be good enough to give our systems a little bit of a head start against a smallpox infection. A little bit of a head start in antibody production is all we need to assure that smallpox for us would be only a minor illness.
However, if the smallpox sample is subjected to ANY genetic engineeering, no matter how minor, then all bets are off.
My friend who is a biologist said the exact same thing as you. Okay now, when they were vaccinating way back when, did they have to re-vaccinate people every 3-10 years to keep it active? Or was it a one time deal. That should give us a clue as to it's length of protection.
Great post. I received the small pox vaccination many years ago. My question is, would smallpox antibodies be detected in a blood test, and if so, which one?