- The ARC - California Edition -

Variola Virus Given Reprieve

Smallpox disease, a major killer for centuries, used to kill, disfigure or blind millions of people each year. It was over two hundred years ago (May 14, 1796) that a clinical researcher took the first step to induce immunity for smallpox by introducing an infection of another disease, cowpox, into a human. This step created a tool that would change the health of entire populations.

The last known case of the smallpox disease occurred in the country of Somalia in October 1977. Three years after that event and following a worldwide program of immunization, the World Health Organization declared smallpox globally eradicated. Over 20 years have now passed and smallpox remains the only naturally occurring disease which has been eliminated from the human population.

Smallpox has been eradicated, but the variola virus, which is the cause of the smallpox disease, is not extinct. There are two known stock piles of the variola virus that continue to exist – one in a high security research institution in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at Atlanta, Georgia, and another in a similar facility in the Russian Federation at Koltsovo in the heart of the Urals.

On a number of occasions, various individuals and groups have made recommendations to the World Health Organization (composed of 191 member states) to destroy the remaining variola virus stocks. Yet not everyone is ready to pull the switch on variola. Some experts fear that other states could be hiding stocks of the virus for potential use in terrorist activities or germ warfare.

In May of 1996, the WHO delegate body adopted a resolution providing for the destruction of the last known stocks on June 30, 1999. This unanimous decision allowed a period of three years to make sure that the political will existed to destroy the virus.

But “political will” must be a variable. Early in 1999, both Russia and the United States indicated that they were now opposed to the immediate destruction of the virus as their countries had concerns that hidden stocks of variola could get into the hands of terrorists. As a result of these objections, the World Health Assembly accepted a resolution authorizing the virus to be held at the laboratories in the United States and Russia until no later than the year 2002.