I watched the Kurgesagt video about smallpox and he gave a explanation by saying that the immune system took control and it eventually kills the virus,but if you can give a more in depth explanation about it becuese the virus was all over the body and it would have been very hard for the immune system to cope with it knowing that it caused so much damage
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Same as any virus, really: You recognize it as foreign, develop antibodies to flag invaded cells, make them in huge numbers, and kill every godforsaken cell the virus has infected. Try not to kill yourself in the process, heal and rebuild later
It takes about two weeks for a proper B cell response to produce high affinity antibodies in great numbers. You need these to *really* clear out very small pathogens like viruses, which for the most part are too tiny for cellular immunity (i.e. T cells, NK cells, etc) to directly sense and kill.
If you can manage to not die before that point, you have a shot at recovering.
It would just do what it always does. it sets off a general immune response to detected problems, and just starts throwing antibodies around at random. Sooner or later the right antibody touches the virus, and then your immune system focuses on that and wipes it out.
Whether or not you survive depends on how fast that happened. Fortunately your immune system has had billions of years of practice doing this, so it will keep going no matter how much damage has been done.
Not all smallpox strains were as deadly as some others.
I believe the first idea of a vaccine was when they realized that people who had a mild case were then immune to the deadlier versions of smallpox.
They started intentionally infecting people with a mild version so they would be likely to survive with minimal damage and be safe from small pox.
In parts of China they would introduce a weakened version of it to people so that they could potentially develop immunity. They would grind up an infected person’s scabs and put the powder up a non-infected person’s nose. If they became infected, it was usually a milder version and would prevent later, more severe, infections.
Not all cases of smallpox were as severe as each other, and some people would have a higher genetic resistance to smallpox because it’s prevalence induced significant selective pressures over the years. There are also other closely related poxviruses (like cowpox) to which exposure would at least reduce the risk of getting severely ill if you did catch smallpox.
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