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Take this comment with a grain of salt, but there was an episode of House where his patient dug up some old treasure chest and it had a bottle with smallpox sores and they got infected. I remember him saying the virus can lay dormant for a long time. I’d make a phone call or two and get that safely dealt with.

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The Lancet had a series of articles in the early 1980s about smallpox in Egyptian mummies, and the risk to Egyptologists. As far as I remember, at least some mummy bodies were preserved in cool, non-dry surroundings which are the best conditions for maintaining viability of the virus. There were also letters about people finding envelopes in old desks containing saved smallpox scabs, and there was concern about the viability of organisms in those. Bottom line: no one really knows. (Always a good answer in medicine.)

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