Definition of "poxvirus" []

• Any of a group of DNA-containing viruses, including those that cause smallpox, cowpox, and other poxlike diseases in vertebrates. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Over roughly the past decade, the CDC has been called to retrieve the remains of a man covered with smallpox lesions whose coffin was unearthed during construction near Louisville, Ky., as well as suspicious-looking scabs in a library book in New Mexico and a museum in Arkansas, says Inger Damon, chief of the CDC's poxvirus and rabies branch."
• "The smallpox vaccine is made using a poxvirus that infects cows (cowpox or vaccinia)."
• "So far the most promising of these vaccines has been one using another poxvirus -- canarypox -- to deliver HIV recombinants (See Table 2)."