Federal scientists last week discovered a half dozen bottles of forgotten smallpox virus while cleaning an area storage on the campus of the National Institutes of health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Smallpox or smallpox, which killed hundreds of millions before it was declared eradicated in 1980 through a vaccination campaign in the world, is legally registered in only two places in the United States and Russia.
The six vials of lyophilized virus, apparently in 1950, were found by a scientist from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on July 1 in a cold room which was originally part of an NIH lab, but he was transferred to the FDA in early 1970. the laboratory of the FDA moved to the main campus of the FDA, according to ABC News, NBC Washington, and a statement today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The vials were labeled as containing smallpox and were packed in a cardboard box with 10 other vials with fuzzy labels, reports ABC News.
NIH immediately placed the vials in a maximum containment laboratory in Bethesda and CDC notified of the discovery. Yesterday, a team of three CDC stole samples by government aircraft in Atlanta and transferred them to Biosafety Level 4 laboratory CDC, where screening overnight revealed that the six labeled as variola virus were positive for DNA smallpox. Further tests will reveal whether the virus can grow in culture, said CDC.
The bottles will then be destroyed, and if they contain viable virus the World Health Organization (WHO) will be invited to supervise the destruction. CDC Division of Select Agents and Toxins working with the FBI to investigate the origin of the samples. Smallpox is regulated as selection agent under US laws that require practical security and special security.
Most Americans born since 1972 have not been vaccinated against smallpox. Under an agreement with the WHO 1979 the only other official of the live variola stocks are kept at the CDC in Atlanta and the VECTOR laboratory in Novosibirsk, Russia. Every few years, WHO considers that these stocks should be destroyed. At a meeting in May, the WHO member again postponed a decision because some experts argued that the stocks are still needed for research.
Not smallpox vials were first time unexpectedly found in a laboratory. According to this article in 09 by the late bioweapons researcher Jonathan Tucker, after most of the smallpox stocks were moved to the two repositories, "[a] some scientific research centers have also reported finding and destroying vials containing the virus smallpox which was withheld accidentally in the laboratory freezers, raising fears that other poorly secured samples may exist that could fall into the hands of terrorists. "
last December, WHO is an advisory committee of smallpox has indicated that the organization was "finalizing arrangements for the destruction of variola virus cloned DNA fragments that have been stored in South Africa. "It is not known whether the fragments, which can be used for vaccine development, represented a serious threat to safety. Their destruction would have occurred this past January under the supervision of WHO.
In an earlier incident, forgotten smallpox samples were found in a laboratory in Eastern Europe in the 190s, former WHO official David Heymann told NBC Washington. Thomas Inglesby, director of the Center for security health at the University of Pittsburgh medical center in Pennsylvania, wrote in an e-mail to Science Insider he is not aware of other such discoveries: "My colleagues and ... I do not remember other times with discoveries like this. ... not to say that did not happen, but nothing that we know. "
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