Officials Learning From Smallpox Alarms

Once or twice a month, federal health officials mobilize to investigate a patient who might have smallpox, a case so suspicious it cannot be ruled out immediately. All false alarms so far, but excellent practice for the real thing, says the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"We regard these false alarms as a very good thing," Dr. Julie Gerberding said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press. "Every one of these is an opportunity to learn something."

This has probably been posted before, but hey I'm sure there are some folks who have not seen it and it's a good wake up call for those sitting on the fence about Iraq.

My gut feeling is that our country would not be stockpiling vaccine if there was not a real and credible danger.

Excerpt from the Demon In The Freezer...

There is a growing suspicion among experts that the smallpox virus may also live unofficially in clandestine biowarfare laboratories in a number of countries around the world, including labs on military bases in Russia that are closed to outside observers. The Central Intelligence Agency has become deeply alarmed about smallpox. Since 1995, a number of leading American biologists and public-health doctors have been given classified national-security briefings on smallpox. They have been shown classified evidence that as recently as 1992 Russia had the apparent capability of launching strategic-weapons-grade smallpox in special biological warheads on giant SS-18 intercontinental missiles that were targeted on the major cities of the United States. In the summer of last year, North Korea fired a ballistic missile over Japan in a test, and the missile fell into the sea. Some knowledgeable observers thought that the missile could have been designed to carry a biologic warhead. If it had carried smallpox and landed in Japan, it could have devastated Japan's population: Japan has almost no smallpox vaccine on hand and its government seems to have no ability to deal with a biological attack. The United States government keeps a list of nations and groups that it suspects either have clandestine stocks of smallpox or seem to be trying to buy or steal the virus. The list is classified, but it is said to include Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, and Serbia. The list may also include the terrorist organization of Osama bin Laden and, possibly, the Aum Shinrikyo sect of Japan -- a quasi-religious group that had Ph.D. biologists as members and a belief that an apocalyptic war will bring them worldwide power. Aum members released nerve gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995, and, as the year 2000 approaches, the group is still active in Japan and in Russia. In any case, the idea that smallpox lives in only two freezers was never anything more than a comfortable fiction. No one knows exactly who has smallpox today, or where they keep the virus, or what they intend to do with it

http://cryptome.org/smallpox-wmd.htm

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