The Hindu : Move to destroy smallpox virus stocks deferred

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, May 24, 2002

Southern States

Southern States - Kerala

Move to destroy smallpox virus stocks deferred

By N. Gopal Raj

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM May 23. Should the world destroy its last remaining official stocks of the Variola virus which causes smallpox? Or, with bioterrorism a very real possibility, are these stocks needed more than ever before to create new drugs, diagnostics and vaccines?

Faced with this question at its meeting last week, the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the World Health Organisation, opted to reverse its earlier decision and postpone destroying the smallpox stocks. The experts are divided, some insisting that retention of the stocks was essential while others condemn the move.

Following the worldwide eradication of smallpox by 1980, the WHO asked all laboratories to either destroy their stocks of the smallpox virus or else transfer them to one of the two reference laboratories — one in the United States and the other in the Soviet Union. In 1996, the World Health Assembly decided that even the stocks held by the two reference laboratories should be destroyed by mid-1999. In the face of resistance from the United States and Russia, the Assembly later extended that deadline to the end of 2002.

After the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States followed soon after by the anthrax episodes in that country, Governments have been taking the possibility of bioterrorist attacks seriously. The United States, in particular, has boosted its spending on countering germ warfare. It is laying in more smallpox vaccine and is also funding research for the speedy detection of smallpox, new vaccines and more effective treatment.

An expert committee set up by the WHO reported that "despite the considerable progress that has been made in investigating Variola virus, significant components of this research, most notably the refinement and use of an animal model developed in 2001 and the development of antiviral drugs, were unlikely to be completed by the end of 2002''. The committee recommended that the deadline for destruction of the Variola stocks be extended "in order to allow essential research to be completed''.

Kalyan Banerjee, former director of the National Institute of Virology and a dissenting member of the WHO committee, says that the Variola virus stocks were not required either for creating better vaccines or for developing animal models to test new drugs.

e points out that smallpox was eradicated from the world using vaccines based on the Vaccinia virus, not Variola. The Monkey Pox provided a sufficient animal model for drug testing.

The Russians were known to have weaponised the smallpox virus, and he feared that research would only be a camouflage for the U.S. to do the same.

"We need to get rid of smallpox to make the world a safer place,'' says Alfred Sommer, Dean of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. In a recent issue of The Scientist, he has said that retaining the official smallpox stocks would be counter-productive.

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