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Russia, U.S. are guarding the world’s last stocks of smallpox.

Friday, May 23, 2014 15:26

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Russia, U.S. are guarding the world’s last stocks of smallpox.

Why Russia, U.S. are guarding the world’s last stocks of smallpox Should the world finally destroy its last two stockpiles of the smallpox virus, one of the deadliest pathogens known to man? On Friday, the World Health Assembly will debate this question. Should the world finally destroy its last remaining samples of variola , one of the deadliest viruses known to man? For many, a better question might be: why is this even a question? Variola causes smallpox , a highly-infectious disease that kills about a third of its victims and wiped out as many as 500 million people in the 20th century. While smallpox was eradicated in 1980 ( thanks, vaccines! ), the virus lives on in just two countries: Russia and the United States, where just-in-case samples are still being stored in high-security laboratories. The World Health Organization has said these stockpiles should be destroyed — but the question of “when” remains less clear. The General Assembly has met six times to settle on a date for burning the stockpiles but the decision has been deferred each time; on Friday, the question will come up once again at the 67 th World Health Assembly , currently underway in Geneva. Why is the virus being kept around at all? The short answer is fear — fear that smallpox could someday return. We don’t know, for instance, whether there are clandestine stockpiles of smallpox, maintained by hostile states or terrorist organizations. The virus’s genome has also been published, meaning it could be engineered by anyone with adequate scientific expertise and access to a DNA synthesizer — which anyone can buy on eBay nowadays. Scientists also haven’t figured out how long the virus can survive in human tissue — Dutch researchers managed to continually extract live virus from smallpox scabs collected in the 50s for up to 13 years, according to an article in Nature . And that was in a temperate climate — it’s certainly possible the virus is being kept alive in bodies that have been frozen or, as virologist Peter Jahrling told Nature, in “mummies in cold crypts.”