A threat worse than any terrorist group reminds us that it is still there.
http://www.vox.com/2014/7/8/5881737/for ... orage-room
Fortunately:Oops: Forgotten vials of smallpox were just found in an old storage room
Updated by Brad Plumer on July 8, 2014, 4:10 p.m. ET @bradplumer brad@vox.com
Scientists find the strangest things when they're cleaning out old refrigerators. Like… smallpox.
"Employees at the NIH stumbled on six forgotten vials of smallpox"
Last week, employees at the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland were cleaning out an old storage room when they happened upon six glass vials of smallpox that had been packed up in a cardboard box, placed in a refrigerator, and then forgotten.
The vials didn't appear to pose any health threat. They were all sealed, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it hasn't found any exposure risk to either employees or the public. It's even possible that the viruses had already been dead for many years.
But what's unnerving is that loose samples of smallpox aren't supposed to exist. Back in 1980, after public-health officials had eradicated smallpox around the world, the World Health Organization consolidated the last few remaining samples into two labs: a CDC lab in Atlanta and a Russian lab in Novosibirsk, Siberia. All other samples of smallpox were assumed to be destroyed.
It's not clear how this particular sample managed to evade detection for so long. The vials appear to date from the 1950s, officials said. The laboratory where the vials were found was transferred from the NIH to the Food and Drug Administration back in 1972. The samples then remained undiscovered until this year, when FDA officials were preparing to move the lab from its current location to the FDA's main campus. ... "
http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/smallpox/va ... on/faq.asp
(smallpox vaccine does not use the smallpox organism itself)"... After the events of September and October, 2001, however, the U.S. government took further actions to improve its level of preparedness against terrorism. For smallpox, this included updating a response plan and increasing the amount of smallpox vaccine in the stockpile. We now have enough vaccine in the stockpile to vaccinate every person in the United States in the event of a smallpox emergency. (updated Dec 29, 2004)
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