Posted on 02/17/2002 12:53:22 PM PST by knak
WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (Reuters) - An experiment aimed at stretching out current U.S. supplies of smallpox vaccine is going very well, the head of the government agency sponsoring the tests said on Sunday.
Most of the people who have volunteered to get watered-down versions of the smallpox vaccine have had a "take" -- meaning their arms have blistered up, which in turn suggests they have some immunity, Dr. Anthony Fauci told a news conference.
"I can tell you that the study was very successful -- it had a very high take rate," Fauci told a news conference at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston.
Fauci heads the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, which is sponsoring the research.
Smallpox was declared officially eradicated worldwide in 1980, and the last naturally occurring case was in 1977. Vaccination stopped in the United States in 1978 and the familiar round scar on the arm made by the vaccine now effectively dates people over the age of 20.
But even before the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, experts had been warning of the potential of a biological attack and said smallpox could be a top weapon of choice.
WEAPONS EXPERIMENTATION
It is highly infectious, kills about 30 percent of patients and scars most of the rest. Although it does not exist in nature any more, the United States and Soviet Union kept samples and experts say the Soviets and other governments experimented with weapons made from smallpox.
The anthrax attacks in October heightened even more the worries that diseases might be used as weapons against the U.S. population.
The United States has 15 million doses of smallpox vaccine and tests are underway to see if these can be stretched out by diluting them. Fauci said the government will report on the results soon.
The United States has contracted with two companies to make more than 200 million more doses "so that we would be able to, if necessary, vaccinate everyone," Fauci said.
The U.S. is also sponsoring research to formulate a "third generation" vaccine that would cause fewer side-effects. The current vaccines use a live virus that is harmless in healthy people but which kills one to two in a million who get it -- mostly those with suppressed immune systems.
AIDS patients would be in danger from the vaccine.
SEEKING ANTHRAX SOURCE
Other experts told the AAAS meeting of efforts to use genomics, the study of an organism's collection of genes, to try and find out where the anthrax in the October letter attacks came from.
But Dr. Clare Fraser of The Institute for Genomic Research, which is sequencing the anthrax genome, said the effort will not produce an answer quickly and is unlikely to solve the crime.
"I think it is a little bit premature to say whether it is possible to trace the organism genomically," she said.
Fraser said some genetic differences had been found between the anthrax spores packed into a letter sent to a Florida newspaper office that killed one man and made another sick and the Ames strain -- a strain of anthrax used widely in U.S.
"We have some found differences between the reference Ames strain and the Florida isolate," Fraser said.
David Franz of the Southern Research Institute and a former Department of Defense bioterrorism expert, said the search should focus on people with advanced microbiological skills.
"I believe that whoever produced the formulation that we saw in the Daschle letter was someone who knew what they were doing, who was a craftsman, who didn't just start with a page from the Internet, a book from the library in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other and cook this up," he said.
"It would not take a complex lab to do if the individual knew exactly what he or she was doing."
Interesting. So much for the "VRWC minion stealing a sample from an American lab & mailing it around" theory.
It was my impression we didnt have any vaccine - Am I imagining this - what were your recollections ?
Add to 'Anthrax' Index.
Fraser said some genetic differences had been found between the anthrax spores packed into a letter sent to a Florida newspaper office that killed one man and made another sick and the Ames strain -- a strain of anthrax used widely in U.S.
:-(
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