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From a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, by Mrs. Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health

Smallpox is not immediately contagious.

A person infected with smallpox does not become contagious until he or she is too sick to be walking around.

If you are wondering if the guy next to you on the subway has smallpox and decide to hold your breath between stops just in case, you are worrying needlessly.

In the first 12 days or so after infection, the patient feels fine and is not contagious.

On or about the 12th day, there is a spike in fever, and the, after a couple of days, the appearance of a rash-the highly visible “pox”- which is the signature of smallpox.

The beginning of the onset of the rash signals communicability.

By this time, the patient is bedridden, or in a medical facility, which is why most secondary infections occur at home or in a hospital, not in schools or other public places.

For this and other reasons, smallpox transmission throughout the population is generally slower than for such diseases as measles or chickenpox.

Of course, should a terrorist attempt to spread the virus by means of an aerosol release, this limitiation on vnues for infection would not be relevant.

But such means of transmission is at this point only theoretical.

It would be difficult to acquire and disseminate the virus-much more so than anthrax.

Even if there were an illicit source of smallpox, a terrorist would have to overcome sophisticated scientific and technological obstacles to cultivate it (one would need to grow the virus in eggs or animal cells) and disseminate it (putting it in the form of inhalable particles).

Theoretically, it wold be possible to have an individual “suicide vector”walk around once contagious, but one might question whether even the most devoted terrorist would be physically capable of effectively spreading the disease given the severity of the illness once it become communicable.

-regarding the article and the reassurances contained in it-I think there's a difference-probably-between plain old vanilla small pox and turbo charged weapons grade small pox. We had operational stealth fighters for twenty years before they officially admitted it-wonder what's out there and how nasty it is in biocootie military lab, Inc.- land?

Bottom line is I ain't betting on wussy civvie-brand strains of anything, nor on any of the medical establishment-public versions- to have much of a clue, either, until they see it for the first time in the emergency rooms..

That Wall Street Journal article was, like many of the posts on this thread, an exercise in denial and an attempt to marginalize legitimate concerns.

I suggest you and the author of the article study last summer's Dark Winter exercise.

Hopefully, we will not have to deal with the smallpox threat. The main issue in my mind is that we shoud not have to be worring about it at all. The government should NEVER have stood down on the vaccination program as long at there was a potential for its deployment as a bioweapon.