Saturday's health stories
Scientists piece together extinct poxvirus
Researchers have re-created the extinct horsepox virus, which is closely related to smallpox, by cobbling together a patchwork of remaining pieces of DNA. The Canadian team's methods haven't been published but were reported in the news section of the journal Science on Thursday. Horsepox is harmless to humans, but scientists say this research means that smallpox may not be as extinct as previously thought.
"No question. If it's possible with horsepox, it's possible with smallpox," virologist Gerd Sutter of Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, told Science. A World Health Organization report on the research says that recreating viruses this way takes little time, money or skill.
Why it matters: Smallpox plagued humans for thousands of years, before it was eradicated in 1977. The disease was horrific: before the smallpox vaccination was created, 1 out of 10 children in France and 1 in 7 children in Russia would die from the virus.
World's largest online illegal drug marketplace goes dark
AlphaBay, the largest online marketplace for drugs, has been out of commission for the past two days, prompting users to question the reasons behind its outage, per the New York Times.
- Possibility #1: The site has been seized by federal investigators, much like the Silk Road in 2013.
- Possibility #2: The site's operators have shut it down in an "exit scam," making off with users' deposited cash — no small sum since AlphaBay routinely cleared $600,000 to $800,000 daily.
- Possibility #3: The site is simply down for maintenance, as one of its administrators claimed in a post on Reddit.
Why it matters: With the opioid epidemic raging, dark web drug sites are a big source of illegal drugs — but even if the federal government managed to shut down AlphaBay, there are already plenty of competitors ready to take its place.