.Bioterror Fears Prompt U.S. to Keep Its Smallpox Cache .
The U.S. and Russia will fight international efforts this week to set a deadline to destroy the last known stocks of smallpox, saying the deadly virus is needed for research to combat bioterrorism.
Members of the World Health Organization meet on Wednesday to begin debating the future of what is left of what was one of the world's most lethal viruses before it was eradicated more than 30 years ago: samples kept in tightly guarded freezers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and a Russian government lab near Novosibirsk.
The U.S. says it needs to maintain the virus samples to develop new drugs and vaccines to counter a potential bioterror attack or accidental release of smallpox from an unsanctioned stock. "Our position is that we need to have the virus collections maintained for the foreseeable future," said a U.S. official familiar with the matter.
Russia also believes the virus should be kept for research and is likely to concur with the U.S. position, said Vladimir Starodubov, an official in the Russian delegation to the WHO executive board.
But Washington and Moscow must win over other governments and public-health officials who fear the virus could be stolen or unleashed by accident.
Smallpox is estimated to have killed hundreds of millions of people—roughly a third of those it infected—and left millions more scarred or blind over thousands of years before a global campaign finally halted the virus by 1980. It is the only human disease ever to have been eradicated by vaccination, and its extermination is considered a milestone in medical history.
Whether to extinguish the remaining smallpox strains has been one of the fiercest debates in global public health over the past two decades. Some say the argument is moot: Smallpox could eventually be synthesized in a lab, making total eradication impossible. Others argue the threat of a synthetic virus is all the more reason to get rid of the remaining strains.
The U.S. could face opposition from developing countries, where the memory of smallpox is freshest. "To put it bluntly, it is the same logic by which the superpowers continue the possession of the nuclear weapons; they wish to hold on to the smallpox virus as a super bio-weapon," said Kalyan Banerjee, a virologist from India, former member of a WHO advisory committee on smallpox research and now a committee adviser.
Destroying the virus is "not good public policy," said Kenneth Bernard, a health security expert in the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He said strains could exist outside of the U.S. and Russian facilities, posing a global threat.
Some scientists also argue the smallpox virus should be retained to unlock the secrets to its unique ability to target the human immune system.
On Wednesday, representatives of 34 countries, including the U.S. and Russia, are scheduled to discuss whether enough research has been completed on developing medical defenses to the virus to set a deadline for destroying the remaining samples. The group's executive board will then pass the debate on to the agency's larger decision-making body, the World Health Assembly, which will issue a decision at a meeting in May.
Once the virus stocks are destroyed, "any lab, scientist or country found to have the virus after the date of destruction is de facto guilty of very serious crimes against humanity," said D.A. Henderson, head of the WHO's eradication campaign and a former top government bioterror scientist after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He is now a distinguished scholar at the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh.
The World Health Assembly agreed in 1996 that surviving smallpox stocks be destroyed. But the virus has won multiple stays of execution as fears of bioterrorism spread.
A review completed late last year by a WHO advisory committee concluded samples of the virus were needed for the development of antiviral medications, as well as a vaccine with fewer side effects. The U.S. and Russian labs conduct research in both areas.
"There are scientifically valid reasons to continue to study the virus in safe and secure circumstances," said Inger Damon, chief of the CDC's poxvirus section and rabies branch. She is one of fewer than 10 CDC scientists with access, via security codes and retinal scans, to the high-security laboratory where 451 smallpox samples are kept frozen in liquid nitrogen.
U.S. officials say they need in particular to finish developing and licensing antiviral medications to treat infected people. None are currently approved.
The Russian State Research Center for Virology and Biotechnology Vector has 120 samples, with access controlled by guards and security systems. The WHO conducts inspections of the U.S. and Russian facilities.
U.S. officials say they fear a lethal strain of smallpox could be developed into a weapon through genetic engineering or synthesis and unleashed against a generation of people who have never been vaccinated.
While smallpox doesn't naturally spread as easily as some other infectious diseases—infected people aren't contagious until they are sick—world travel creates new risks, say experts.
Some worry about secret stockpiles of smallpox. Inspections in Iraq during 2003 and 2004 yielded some "credible intelligence and information that suggests it was there" but "no smoking gun," according to a former U.S. official and inspector for the United Nations familiar with the matter.
The U.S. has spent $1.8 billion since 2001 on smallpox countermeasures, mostly to buy vaccine. The government has stockpiled more than 300 million doses—enough for every person in the U.S.
No one is known to have synthesized smallpox, but terrorists could eventually learn how, said geneticist J. Craig Venter. "At the moment it requires a pretty sophisticated scientific team," he said. The smallpox virus is also quite large, he said: "Only a few labs in the world have the skill set for handling large pieces of DNA. It gets very brittle as it gets larger."
In a paper posted online last week, smallpox expert Jonathan B. Tucker proposed partial destruction of the virus stocks as a compromise. The U.S. and Russia could winnow their collections to 10 strains, he wrote in the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science.
WSJ
Members of the World Health Organization meet on Wednesday to begin debating the future of what is left of what was one of the world's most lethal viruses before it was eradicated more than 30 years ago: samples kept in tightly guarded freezers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and a Russian government lab near Novosibirsk.
The U.S. says it needs to maintain the virus samples to develop new drugs and vaccines to counter a potential bioterror attack or accidental release of smallpox from an unsanctioned stock. "Our position is that we need to have the virus collections maintained for the foreseeable future," said a U.S. official familiar with the matter.
Russia also believes the virus should be kept for research and is likely to concur with the U.S. position, said Vladimir Starodubov, an official in the Russian delegation to the WHO executive board.
But Washington and Moscow must win over other governments and public-health officials who fear the virus could be stolen or unleashed by accident.
Smallpox is estimated to have killed hundreds of millions of people—roughly a third of those it infected—and left millions more scarred or blind over thousands of years before a global campaign finally halted the virus by 1980. It is the only human disease ever to have been eradicated by vaccination, and its extermination is considered a milestone in medical history.
Whether to extinguish the remaining smallpox strains has been one of the fiercest debates in global public health over the past two decades. Some say the argument is moot: Smallpox could eventually be synthesized in a lab, making total eradication impossible. Others argue the threat of a synthetic virus is all the more reason to get rid of the remaining strains.
The U.S. could face opposition from developing countries, where the memory of smallpox is freshest. "To put it bluntly, it is the same logic by which the superpowers continue the possession of the nuclear weapons; they wish to hold on to the smallpox virus as a super bio-weapon," said Kalyan Banerjee, a virologist from India, former member of a WHO advisory committee on smallpox research and now a committee adviser.
Destroying the virus is "not good public policy," said Kenneth Bernard, a health security expert in the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He said strains could exist outside of the U.S. and Russian facilities, posing a global threat.
Some scientists also argue the smallpox virus should be retained to unlock the secrets to its unique ability to target the human immune system.
On Wednesday, representatives of 34 countries, including the U.S. and Russia, are scheduled to discuss whether enough research has been completed on developing medical defenses to the virus to set a deadline for destroying the remaining samples. The group's executive board will then pass the debate on to the agency's larger decision-making body, the World Health Assembly, which will issue a decision at a meeting in May.
Once the virus stocks are destroyed, "any lab, scientist or country found to have the virus after the date of destruction is de facto guilty of very serious crimes against humanity," said D.A. Henderson, head of the WHO's eradication campaign and a former top government bioterror scientist after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He is now a distinguished scholar at the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh.
The World Health Assembly agreed in 1996 that surviving smallpox stocks be destroyed. But the virus has won multiple stays of execution as fears of bioterrorism spread.
A review completed late last year by a WHO advisory committee concluded samples of the virus were needed for the development of antiviral medications, as well as a vaccine with fewer side effects. The U.S. and Russian labs conduct research in both areas.
"There are scientifically valid reasons to continue to study the virus in safe and secure circumstances," said Inger Damon, chief of the CDC's poxvirus section and rabies branch. She is one of fewer than 10 CDC scientists with access, via security codes and retinal scans, to the high-security laboratory where 451 smallpox samples are kept frozen in liquid nitrogen.
U.S. officials say they need in particular to finish developing and licensing antiviral medications to treat infected people. None are currently approved.
The Russian State Research Center for Virology and Biotechnology Vector has 120 samples, with access controlled by guards and security systems. The WHO conducts inspections of the U.S. and Russian facilities.
U.S. officials say they fear a lethal strain of smallpox could be developed into a weapon through genetic engineering or synthesis and unleashed against a generation of people who have never been vaccinated.
While smallpox doesn't naturally spread as easily as some other infectious diseases—infected people aren't contagious until they are sick—world travel creates new risks, say experts.
Some worry about secret stockpiles of smallpox. Inspections in Iraq during 2003 and 2004 yielded some "credible intelligence and information that suggests it was there" but "no smoking gun," according to a former U.S. official and inspector for the United Nations familiar with the matter.
The U.S. has spent $1.8 billion since 2001 on smallpox countermeasures, mostly to buy vaccine. The government has stockpiled more than 300 million doses—enough for every person in the U.S.
No one is known to have synthesized smallpox, but terrorists could eventually learn how, said geneticist J. Craig Venter. "At the moment it requires a pretty sophisticated scientific team," he said. The smallpox virus is also quite large, he said: "Only a few labs in the world have the skill set for handling large pieces of DNA. It gets very brittle as it gets larger."
In a paper posted online last week, smallpox expert Jonathan B. Tucker proposed partial destruction of the virus stocks as a compromise. The U.S. and Russia could winnow their collections to 10 strains, he wrote in the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science.
WSJ
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