Smallpox virus: the secret stocks

Official supplies of the variola virus that causes smallpox are confined to two high-security laboratories in the United States and Russia, but the virus is still regarded as one of about 20 pathogens that could be used in a biological attack.

A recent Bush administration intelligence review reportedly concludes that stocks of the live virus are also held by Iraq, North Korea and, more surprisingly, France, and that Osama bin Laden had devoted resources to developing smallpox as a biological weapon.

The French government vigorously denied the report, but the growing indications that the genie is at least partly out of the bottle is likely to cause governments to review and step up procedures for dealing with infectious threats.

Despite the French denial of the U.S. intelligence report, it would not be surprising if France and other countries were experimenting with something short of the live virus to carry out defensive research. A French Foreign Ministry spokesman, Bernard Valero, acknowledged that scientists were using material "not dangerous to man" in their search for a new smallpox vaccine.

Riccardo Witteck, a smallpox expert at the University of Lausanne, who formerly worked for the World Health Organization, said it was quite usual for researchers to obtain short DNA fragments of the virus for study. "The only restriction under World Health Organization rules," he said, "is that the DNA material must not exceed more than 20 percent of the total genome of the virus."

Some governments are considering whether to follow the United States in building enough vaccine stocks to inoculate the entire population against smallpox. Others argue that it would be sufficient to keep only enough supplies to create firewalls around any outbreak.

The World Health Organization keeps an emergency stock of about 500,000 doses of the vaccine in the Netherlands. Researchers are trying to determine if stocks can be diluted and still retain their efficiency so that many more people may be inoculated while fresh supplies are being manufactured.

The organization advises against mass vaccination against smallpox. The vaccine consists of a live related virus, called vaccinia, which causes generally mild symptoms in most people but can have serious and even fatal effects for some, particularly those with immune system weaknesses. Vaccinia also is infectious.

"No government gives or recommends the vaccine routinely," the Word Health Organization said. "It should be given only to those persons who have a high risk of coming into contact with the virus that causes smallpox, or who have been exposed."

Still, senior officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are considering whether to offer the vaccine to the general public once up to 10 million health care workers have been immunized and after a vaccine has been licensed for general use, which is unlikely to be before 2004.

Any country adopting a policy of universal vaccination might also be considering the use of the variola virus for aggressive purposes. Defense experts said an important tool in preparing for biological attack is tracking the manufacture and use of vaccines.

If the response is quick enough, a smallpox outbreak - which could mean just a single case - could be brought under control using the same method that was used to the eradicate the disease in the 1960s and 1970s - quickly identifying and vaccinating anyone who has been in contact with the sick person, experts say. Fortunately, doctors say, the vaccinia virus produces antibodies quickly and is usually effective even after someone has been in contact with smallpox.

The disease spreads relatively slowly, by face to face contact, giving health workers a three- or four-day window of opportunity in which to trace contacts.

How come we didn't hear scare stories about deaths and maiming from the small pox innoculations we all were required to take it up until the 1970s?

Is this a mutent virus? Because everybody's immunity has been diminished, will new vaccinations hit us harder than the ones we had as children?

-----
I am not a medical doctor, so this is not a professional answer. However, I have done a lot of reading and research.

It appears to me that for healthy people this is not any more dangerous than the "old" vaccine, it's the same as that.

Here is an article from the Washington Post, which addresses some of your questions.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40356-2003Jan10.html

"From 1942 to 1990, when smallpox inoculations ceased for military personnel, the armed forces did not record a single fatality from the vaccine, records reviewed by The Washington Post show. The overall incidence of adverse reactions was so low that the military program continued years after experts counseled that there was no longer a reason to vaccinate, since smallpox had been eradicated worldwide.
The armed forces vaccine was made from the same strain of vaccinia virus, a cousin of the smallpox virus, that the government plans to use in the coming months to immunize as many as 11 million police officers, firefighters and medical workers who may be called upon to deal with a biological warfare attack."

I think the two real reasons some people (typically the liberals, curiously enough) oppose it, is that there are more people with compromised immunse systems (AIDS, HIV, those who have cancer, or had transplants) (those people could avoid taking the vaccine, that is no reason to deny making it available for everyone else, IMO), and the other reason is just plain political, they don't want to recognize that there is a threat.

How come we didn't hear scare stories about deaths and maiming from the small pox innoculations we all were required to take it up until the 1970s?

I am not a medical professional (and come think of it neither was i even alive during the 70s LOL) however i think a probable answer for not being inundated with scare stories about the vaccine was because back then smallpox was a real and present danger (instead of a nagging threat as it is today).

It was a dangerous mallady that had to be expunged no matter what, and hence there was a lot of emphasis on the vaccinations and innoculations. Furthermore if you think of it smallpox is a malaise that really messes up your face (if you survive)! That was also a major impetus since no one wanted to have a face full of pockmarks for life.

Thus there was more motivation to get vaccinated even if there were risks. Today small pox is just an open-ended question that could come to haunt us ...but at the same time may never pop up. Hence there is not so much motivation to get vaccinated, and thus the risk factors take pre-eminence over any advantages of vaccination.

A good analogy is cobra anti-venin. Over 10,000 people are killed in India every year by cobras alone (if you add in Banded Kraits and Russell Vipers the number becomes exponentially higher). In India it would be prudent to be injecting villagers in certain areas with cobra anti-venin every 2 weeks so as to hopefully build-up progressive resistance to neurotoxic venom! However the danger of anti-venin is 10% of people are allergic to it, and to that 10% the anti-venin is as dangerous and as potent as the venom itself! However in India that is a risk that can be negated.

However if in the US you started injecting the population with cobra anti-venin every fortnight the deaths (from those people lalergic to the anti venom) would not be worth it since the chance of getting bitten by a cobra (or any 'really dangerous' snakes.....for example those that are called 'Requiem snakes' such as the African Black Mamba and the Australian Taipan which are 70 and 80 times more venomous than a rattlesnake respectively...and that is why i do not include rattlesnakes and copperheads as 'really dangerous') is virtually zero! Thus the warnings would be given about the dangers of cobra anti-venin. However if somehow 500,000 cobras were to be brought to the US and released into the sewer systems of New York (in India there are tales of cobras coming into the house through the toilet) then you would see the warnings against anti-venin disappear and it would be given freely to everyone in NY to keep in their home.

In the same way until SmallPox becomes a real and present danger (instead of a potential improbable one) the warnigns against vaccination will stay. Just hope Small Pox stays in the nightmares of pessimists and is never used as a terrorist weapon!

I am old enough to have been living and vaccinated back then, and yes, everybody knew that there was the slight chance that a vaccination could go bad. One occasionally might hear of such happening, but not much was made of it in the media. The media was not so adversarial in those days. This was still too close to the days of the FDR New Deal and WWII, and the attitude was that if the government felt that something had to be done for the public good, then the public (including the press) should get behind it, unless something went terribly wrong.

Getting a vaccination was a little like being a soldier. You knew that somebody might possibly die, but of course, that would always be somebody else, not you.

Interesting - for a long time now it has been obvious the the administration has had intelligence estimates that somebody had a batch of the virus or we'd never have seen the vaccination programs mentioned, much less ramp up the way they have. What I think the CDC is really preparing for is a blitz campaign on a hotspot, that is, at the first sign of an outbreak flooding the area with vaccine and enough people to administer it. They'd have to plan for multiple, simultaneous instances - this is a model different from a normal geographically-limited disease outbreak but it's what a terrorist might try. At that point people would be considerably less risk-averse (heck, they'd be stampeding to the clinics) and a small, finite casualty rate from the vaccine - you can't get away from that - would be more acceptable than simply vaccinating the entire country against a disease we may never see.

A good analogy is cobra anti-venin.
----
Actually that sounded more like an extreme example both with its danger, and frequency to be given.

As for the "dangers" of the smallpox vaccine -- I bet all vaccines have dangers, yet childhood vaccines are mandatory against many diseases, which are not even close to fatal, merely inconvenient, like whopping cough, measles, etc. Not to mention just about any medication has that at least 1 in a million having a serious negative reaction. Have you read the insert on a "simple" anti-biotic lately, which people routinely get, because they have a minor infection.

Just about anything you do, has some risk.

The point you made about the question whether smallpox is a "real" danger is well taken. We may not be 100% certain, that it is. However, I am personally quite certain, that our government must be 100% certain that there is smallpox in the hands of Saddam and even Al Qaeda, they just don't want to come out and say so, to avoid mass panic. It's "never mind what they say, watch what they do": They would never have started to get all those vaccines ready, vaccinating the military, etc., if they weren't 100% certain of the threat and its seriousness.
And if these suicidal terrorists have it, do you think they would give a second thought to releasing it? Picture 100 terrorists putting smallpox aerosol into the air at airports, malls in a number of major cities. By the time it's discovered, tens of thousands would be ill, and given it to many others.

As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I think the threat of smallpox may not be as small, as we would like to think, and if it's there at all, we are all completely vulnerable. Smallpox wiped out some 500 million people in the twentieth century alone. I don't have my source at my finger tips, but you can do research and find the same info.

I think that is not fear-mongering, merely recognizing, that based on the evidence I see, smallpox today is indeed a clear and present danger.

The danger from the vaccine is minimal, as the article I posted show -- there were NO fatalities between 1948 to 1990, when it was given to the military.

You both have supplied excellent answers.

I really get a kick out of spetznaz's insights into some of these questions. You certainly have a unique perspective! LOL. I WAS around in the 70s, but even during my childhood (the 40s) people weren't afraid of Smallpox. I don't think anyone alive in America younger than 80 had ever seen the disease here or known anyone who died from it. But no one was afraid to take it. I remember lining up at school to get my booster. We welcomed the smallpox booster over the tetanus shot -- the former was a scratch, and the latter really hurt! One of my children reacted pretty harshly to the vaccine (1960) but the others really didn't even get a temperature from it.

One of my friends had an allergic child who could not take the vaccine. All of us young mothers tsk, tsked about it certain that the little girl was in danger. But my friend explained that there had been no cases for so long that it was more dangerous for her daughter to take the vaccine, than not. Besides everyone else was protected so the chances of her daughter getting sick were slim to none!

I've read that there were more deaths caused by smallpox in the aftermath of the American Revolution than were caused by fighting. Smallpox decimated whole villages, brought home by the returning soldiers.

FairOpinion has an astute take on the problem too. Because those with deficient immune systems will not be allowed the vaccine there seems to be a PC movement afoot to discourage everyone else from taking it.

Because those with deficient immune systems will not be allowed the vaccine there seems to be a PC movement afoot to discourage everyone else from taking it.
----
Which of course is totally stupid, putting in more danger the very people they claim they try to protect.
As you mentioned in your post, when everyone else who can take the vaccine, does take it, that protects those who cannot take the vaccine, because they stop the spread of hte disease. So by claiming to protect that "class" of people, they are putting those people in danger, along with everyone else.

But when did the liberals ever have a good idea.

Just allowing voluntary vaccination, would give more people protection, because it would significantly reduce the spreading of the disease, should it come to that.
I am not advocating mandatory vaccinations, only voluntary ones. But I don't think the government should keep people from taking the vaccine, if they chose to do so after consulting with their own physicians as to the risk to themselves.

But I think it it preposterous to keep the vaccine from everyone, because a few, who wouldn't have to take it anyway, might have an adverse reaction.

Some people are deathly allergic to penicillin. Do you think it would be fair to have kept penicillin off the market so nobody could take it?

It is interesting that in my AOL News today there was an announcement that the government has removed liability from health professionals who receive the vaccine and unwittingly pass the infection on to their unvaccinated patients. Since the person being vaccinated is actually mildly contagious for about three days afterward this may present a big problem when they start vaccinating emergency workers and health professionals.
-----

I read that only the actual area of the vaccine is contagious. I also read, that there are special bandages, which were tested and were 100% effective in keeping the virus inside. If someone removes their bandage, touches the area, then touches other things, and so one, that releases the virus. But if precautions are taken the chances of infecting anyone else is less than minimal.

I believe the reason for removing the liability was, because some hospitals were using that as an excuse to not allow their health care employees to get vaccinated.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.