From Russia, without love
How a Cold War climate preserved the pox
Even as mass production of a new smallpox vaccine is planned to protect a vulnerable planet, the last acknowledged stocks of the live virus wait on the biological equivalent of death row in two distant, rival nations.
The officially acknowledged stocks of live smallpox virus are stored at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the Russian State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Koltosovo. The World Health Organization Variola Research Committee recommended this year that the stocks of virus in the United States and Russia be destroyed by 2002. The essential argument for destruction is that the majority of the people on the planet are now susceptible to a rapidly transmitted disease that will kill a third of those infected and badly scar many others.
Moreover, the virus is not needed to make vaccine. Vaccinia (cowpox) is the source of the old and new vaccines. Still, some virologists have argued that a new vaccine or anti-viral treatment could come out of continued research with the smallpox virus. The issue has become increasingly politicized, however, and the two nations now hold their stores in a manner reminiscent of Cold War weapons.
While noting that the U.S. government has acted reluctant in recent years to eradicate the stocks, it was originally the Russians who undermined the world effort to eradicate smallpox, says D.A. Henderson, MD, director of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "We should have done it years ago," he says. "It is pure wishful thinking [that it has any research value]. It has so little basis in science that is just not worth pursuing."
In January 1967, Henderson and fellow scientists at the World Health Organization began an ambitious project to achieve an 80% vaccination level in the countries that still had smallpox. "At the same time, we tried to identify each of the cases and vaccinate around them to prevent the infection from spreading," he recalls. "It was called surveillance and containment. [The project] had a 10-year goal." Eradication was achieved only nine months and 26 days beyond that target, he says matter of factly, as the last reported case of natural infection with smallpox occurred in October 1977. Smallpox was declared globally eradicated in 1980. Ironically, given recent information from Russian defectors, the Soviet Union originally proposed that smallpox eradication be undertaken in 1958, he reminds. The country later provided more than 300 million doses of vaccine and championed the global eradication campaign, Henderson says.
"But at the same time this was going on, there was another, secret component of activity in Russia which was developing the virus for weapons," he notes. "They spent considerable time, effort, and energy solving the problems of producing large quantities of smallpox virus and figuring out how to put it in missiles that could be delivered."
Have pox, will travel
All the while, there is growing suspicion that some of the viral stocks have been removed from the former Soviet Union — or may well be in the future. "There may be smallpox stores currently in the old USSR guarded by low-level military who have not been paid in three months," says Allan J. Morrison Jr., MD, MSc, FACP, a former member of the U.S. Special Forces and now health care epidemiologist for Inova Health System in Washington, DC. "The idea that someone might be offered $5,000 U.S. dollars to take a walk on guard duty and not inventory when they come back is more than a theoretical concern."
Indeed, there is clear evidence that former Russian bioweapons scientists have been recruited by a number of rogue nations, Henderson emphasizes. "Whether they have carried smallpox, anthrax, or what with them we have no idea," he says. "But I think the fact that so many have left the laboratories and are looking for some sort of gainful employment [raises] the question, what do you do after you spent so many years in a laboratory working on biological weapons? Where do you go from there? I believe there is reason to believe that the speculation might have some merit."
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