Posted on 04/24/2002 11:35:47 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
srael, Britain and other countries are moving to acquire stocks of smallpox vaccine as the United States and Russia weigh proposals to begin vaccinating parts of their populations against the disease, according to American and Russian officials and health experts.
The moves are prompted by fears that rogue states or terrorist groups could acquire the smallpox virus and use it as a weapon.
Until the World Health Organization declared the disease eradicated in 1980, smallpox was considered one of the greatest scourges of humanity. It killed about a third of those infected.
The United States began a crash effort to vastly increase its vaccine supplies after anthrax-tainted letters last fall killed 5 people, sickened 17 and prompted thousands of Americans to take antibiotics.
Officials say dilution of existing supplies, a recently discovered stockpile and newly manufactured vaccine will leave the government with enough on hand by next year to vaccinate all Americans. But the vaccine has its own risks of potentially serious side effects, so there is a lively debate about whether it should be used, and by whom.
Other nations are following America's lead. Bill Pierce, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the agency has been talking with representatives of foreign governments about the wisdom of obtaining stocks of vaccines, and expects a round of purchases. "We've had discussions with them," he said.
In Britain, officials announced on April 12 that they had placed an order with a British company for 30 million doses. American experts said Israel had recently ordered six million doses, enough to vaccinate its entire population, and France three million doses.
The March issue of "The CBW Conventions Bulletin," a Harvard journal on chemical and biological weapons that is regarded as authoritative, reported that Germany recently ordered six million doses, Ireland 600,000 and Greece 150,000.
In most cases, where they would obtain their vaccine was not specified, but companies around the world are gearing up to make it.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has said that the Defense Department and its counterpart in Canada signed an agreement in March to collaborate on developing a new generation of smallpox vaccine for their militaries.
Recently the Russian press reported that Moscow had decided to revaccinate its entire population. But in interviews this week, Russian officials and health experts denied those accounts.
Lyubov Voropayeva, a spokeswoman for the Russian Health Ministry, said no decision could be made until the World Health Organization determines in May the fate of the world's two remaining declared stockpiles of the virus — one in Atlanta and the other in Novosibirsk, Siberia.
After the smallpox virus was declared eradicated from human populations, a debate arose over plans to destroy the officially declared virus stocks. But today the United States and Russia oppose destroying the viral stocks for now, saying that studying the virus can help produce new drugs, vaccines and other medical defenses.
The Russian spokeswoman said that if the health organization decided to preserve the virus, "then the question stands of whether the population will be vaccinated or not, who will be vaccinated and what vaccine will be used."
Sergey V. Netesov, the deputy director of Vector, Russia's official repository and one of the world's largest viral research centers, said, "This issue is still under discussion."
But Russian interest in revaccination worries some American officials, given the former Soviet Union's development of smallpox weapons, and concerns that some of Russia's own stocks may have slipped into unfriendly hands. Scientists in the former Soviet Union are known to have made large quantities of smallpox powder, and its fate — and that of the scientists who made it — is unclear.
In 1994 the Defense Intelligence Agency cited an unidentified source as saying that Russia in the early 1990's had shared smallpox technology with Iraq and North Korea.
In Washington, public debate is intensifying over the possibility of voluntary immunizations of emergency health officials and other so-called "first responders." Experts are planning public meetings in the next few months to discuss the issues.
So far, at least, most health officials are arguing against mass inoculations.
Though the smallpox vaccine uses vaccinia virus, a relatively benign cousin of the smallpox virus, it can cause potentially serious health problems and occasionally death. The officials argue that the health risks from widespread vaccination outweigh the risk of a smallpox attack, which most experts consider unlikely.
Also, other countries might assume that any country that vaccinated its people was preparing to use smallpox as a weapon. Even if that assumption were false, experts say, a widespread vaccination could have serious unintended military repercussions.
But others, especially in the American and Russian military, argue that revaccinating selected populations, like soldiers and "first responders," is the only sensible thing to do. If there is an outbreak of the disease, they warn, millions might die, given the increasingly mobile and global world before an epidemic could be contained.
But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that in case of a smallpox outbreak, it will send immunized health workers to vaccinate people around the site of the outbreak in an effort to contain it.
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