Pull around. The World Health Organization has decided to retain the smallpox stocks currently.
GENEVA - the Board of the World Organization of Health Administration (WHO) yesterday decided to delay the destruction of the last known samples of smallpox now kept on ice in two high-security facilities in Russia and the United States. The decision reflects a new consensus that stocks may be needed to defend humanity against the possible use of smallpox as a biological weapon.
Smallpox was eradicated in 1980, and stocks were doomed to destruction in 1993, but two developments helped persuade WHO to delay this order. A well-placed defector revealed that the Soviet Union had amassed tons of smallpox as a weapon. And in the wake of the Gulf War, UN inspectors reported that Iraq may have sought to weaponize smallpox through research on camel pox, a close cousin that is not harmful to humans.
The board acted on the recommendation of the Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland, who based his decision on a report last month from a scientific advisory committee. Staying an execution scheduled for this December, the board delivered a spectacular victory researchers hope to design drugs and a better vaccine. One interesting development is a potential animal model of smallpox developed by virologist Peter Jahrling of the Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and colleagues. The model could be important to test drugs and vaccines.
But some countries are troubled by an open research effort. China, Cuba, and several other countries are expected to pressure hard for a period of fear that an open program increases the risk that terrorists might steal the virus or the virus could escape in a laboratory accident. Observers believe that the World Health Assembly could set a deadline of 05 or 06 for destroying stockpiles when it meets in May.
The growing concern about bioterrorism has led some health experts to question the central principle that stocks of all microbial killer must be destroyed once it is eradicated in the wild. This reaction relates Jonathan Tucker, director of the nonproliferation program chemical and biological weapons at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Washington, DC "The situation of smallpox sets a worrying precedent for other infectious diseases, such as polio and measles, "he said.
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