[MarMema]

It's not smallpox. The last case was seen in 1980.
It's something similar. This would be huge news.

[Almondjoy]

Wouldn't surprise me if it's are good friend and cousin.. chickenpox.. or course there are many other things that could explain this. While smallpox is deadly the person said "we had smallpox here a few years back" like it obviously didn't kill the whole village off like smallpox normally would.

[freepsolo]

Smallpox could be found in remote areas of uncivilized parts of the World.

When they say Smallpox has been eradicated - they mean in
the Western modern civilization sense.

The viewpoint doesn't include barbarians and nomadic
cultures who wonder remote geographic lands.

As Modern civilizations reach into these areas with advanced transportation vehicles (airplanes)
- other outbreaks of thought to be extinct scourges will and can occur. This is a Liberal statement - All "fill in the Blank"
has been eliminated - is based on a static state of nothing ever changing.

The position of a Bureacrat saying eradicated is not based
on fortelling of advancements in World Trade and new technologies advancing
into uncivilized countries. They didn't have cell phones when smallpox was declared dead.

[aruanan]

It's not smallpox. The last case was seen in 1980. It's something similar. This would be huge news.

You and Dog Gone are both too rationalist for your own good. The correct response would have been: "Smallpox is said to have been eradicated. If the current reports are true, then either the previous assertion was faulty or smallpox has been reintroduced to the human population."

By the way, just because a human chain of transmission of the disease had been purportedly broken (last naturally-occurring case was in 1977 in Somalia and there were two cases in 1978 from laboratory exposure in England; it was declared eradicated in 1979) doesn't mean that every organism of this disease has been eradicated from the world. If the coffin were as securely nailed shut as you appear to think it is, there wouldn't be any necessity for all this at the CDC.