SMALLPOX [VARÍOLA]
1 SMALLPOX is a horrible disease. It is easily transmitted, causes blisters all over the body, and kills around 30% of those it infects. Or rather, it did, for smallpox no longer ∃ in nature. After a decades-long campaign of vaccination, the last wild case was diagnosed in 1977. Three years later, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the world free of the disease. The annihilation of an illness that as recently as 1967 was slaughtering 2 million people a year is rightly seen as a triumph of modern medicine.
2 But the virus is not gone completely. Officially, two reservoirs remain, behind locked doors and strict biosafety protocols, in secure laboratories run by America’s Centres for Disease Control (CDC) and the State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology, in Russia. On July 8th, though, the CDC announced that health researchers in Maryland had discovered vials of smallpox sitting in a forgotten refrigerator in a corner of a storehouse belonging to the Food and Drug Administration, America’s medical regulator.
3 As soon as the vials were discovered they were taken to the CDC’s headquarters, in Atlanta, where they are being tested to see if they are still infectious. That done, they will be destroyed under the supervision of the WHO. The FBI, meanwhile, is trying to work out where they came from—they seem to date from the 1950s—and how they were forgotten. The whole episode is embarrassing. It will also provide more fuel for a long-running argument about whether hanging on to smallpox samples, even in the official labs, is a good idea.
4 Many, including scientists involved in the original eradication campaign, think there is no reason to retain such a pestilential pathogen, and that the job of eliminating it should be finished properly. A report by the WHO in 2010 agreed. The revelation that America, which might be expected to have good record-keeping, cannot keep track of all its samples does little to inspire trust.
5 But the discovery can be argued the other way, too. The official justification for keeping the samples is that they would help researchers to fight a renewed outbreak of the disease, either from an undetected natural reservoir or if some unethical country had hung on to samples of its own, perhaps with a view to building a biological weapon out of them. And this is not the first time that forgotten samples have been discovered: a cache turned up in eastern Europe in the 1990s, and in 2003 an envelope full of scabs from 19th-century vaccinations was found in a library in New Mexico.
Adapted from the economist, July 12th - 18th 2014.
According to the information in the article, the WHO
