Historic smallpox records digitized to support future outbreak research

NDORMS DPhil student Rabia Khan has led a collaborative project to digitize historic records from the world’s last naturally occurring smallpox outbreaks, creating an open dataset for future epidemiological and disease modeling research.

Smallpox, a serious, contagious and often fatal viral disease, plagued humans for thousands of years before it was declared eradicated in 1980, following a global vaccination and surveillance program.

However, despite its eradication, smallpox remains relevant to global health security. Routine vaccination ended following eradication, meaning much of today’s population has never been vaccinated. Preserving detailed data from the final outbreaks allows researchers to better understand how the disease spread and to model how a future outbreak could be contained.

Rabia Khan, a DPhil student in Sara Khalid’s Planetary Health Informatics group at the Botnar Institute for Musculoskeletal Sciences and a principal epidemiologist in the Epidemiological Insight Team at the UK Health Security Agency, led a project to digitize historical data and make it globally accessible for researchers to draw lessons for future outbreaks.

Published in Scientific Data, the paper titled ‘Digitization of Historical Data from Somalia’s Last Smallpox Outbreaks 1976–1977‘ was led by Khan as part of her role at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the University of Manchester.

The researchers digitized and curated WHO records from the last naturally occurring outbreaks of variola minor smallpox in Somalia in 1976–77. The original records were contained in more than 500 pages of scanned historic documents, which were unsuitable for automated text extraction and therefore required careful manual transcription and validation.

The resulting dataset contains individual-level information on 3,255 smallpox cases, including age, sex, dates of rash onset and detection, and geographic and outbreak information. The data have been anonymized and made openly available through the UK Data Service ReShare repository.

‘By making these records accessible, we have created a resource that can be used to reconstruct the final outbreaks, investigate patterns of disease transmission and develop infectious disease models,’ said Khan.

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