There were always times in the 1980s when I could not work on Smallpox and its Eradication, and during these periods I produced two other books that expanded on various topics mentioned in that book. The chapter, entitled 'Variola virus and other orthopoxviruses', had been designed to provide background information for public health workers, and I thought that it was timely to expand that chapter into a book for virologists. The result was another book, The Orthopoxviruses, with Keith Dumbell and Riccardo Wittek as co-authors and published by Academic Press in 1989. Zdeno Jezek, one of the co-authors of Smallpox and its Eradication, had been involved in the survey of the human monkeypox set up in Zaire, with assistance from WHO, between 1980 and 1986. He and I collaborated in producing a short review of the results of this survey in another book, entitled Human Monkeypox and published in 1988. Wittek lived in Lausanne, so I was able to consult him and Jezek whenever I went to Geneva.
Since the chapter on virology was one of the first I wrote for Smallpox and its Eradication, by 1982 I had enlisted the help of two co-authors, Samuel Dales and Keith Dumbell, for this book, and, in 1981, I arranged for the book, with those authors, to be published by Academic Press, publishers of my virology textbooks. The proposed publication date was October 1983. We decided that we needed another poxvirus expert who was a molecular biologist and, in 1984, I persuaded Ricardo Wittek to be a co-author. Then, in 1986, Dales had to pull out, and the Memorandum of Agreement had to be altered accordingly. However, by late 1987 it went to press and was published in 1988 (Fenner et al., 1988). It received excellent reviews, including one from a poxvirus expert , who concludes with these remarks: 'This book is highly recommended…and is worth every cent of its price. The chapters are extremely well written, and the content is superb throughout. Collectively, this work presents the best up-to-date summary of the features of these viruses anyone, novice or specialist, is likely to need for a long time to come.'
Human monkeypox had been a problem in the smallpox eradication campaign ever since its discovery in 1970. From 1980 to 1986, WHO supervised institution-based surveillance of monkeypox in selected areas representing about 15 per cent of the land area of Zaire and containing about 5 million inhabitants. In 1984–86, WHO arranged for Dr Lev Khodakevich to supervise surveys in this area to determine the most important animal hosts, which turned out to be several species of squirrels.
Over a period from early 1985 to mid-1986 I corresponded with Zdeno Jezek, who had succeeded Arita as Chief of the Smallpox Eradication Unit, editing his articles on this program. In early 1987, we decided to publish a short book based on the work of the WHO program and I wrote to Joe Melnick, a friend of mine who was the editor of Monographs in Virology, published by S. Karger AG, suggesting that we should publish a monograph on human monkeypox in that series, with Jezek as senior author. He agreed, and Zdeno and I worked together from 30 July, 1987, until it was published in October 1988 (Jezek and Fenner, 1988). It is recognized as the definitive text on human monkeypox.