Monkeypox Could Be Used as Bioweapon

The Russians worked with monkeypox virus, a close cousin to smallpox, in their bioweapons program and it is possible terrorists could use it in a biological attack against the United States, scientists and former United Nations weapons inspectors told United Press International.

Although some biological weapons experts are concerned with the possibility of terrorists using another smallpox-related virus called camelpox, which Iraq has admitted to researching, Mark Buller, a biologist at Saint Louis University who conducts research on smallpox vaccines, said he is more concerned about monkeypox.

Buller's concern stems from the fact that monkeypox, unlike camelpox, causes mortality in humans and the incidence of human infection is on the rise in central and western Africa.

In addition, the Russian biowarfare experts are known to have worked with the virus in the Soviet Union's biological weapons program.

The Soviets decided they did not want to work with smallpox by the late 1980's "and there was significant discussion of the possible use of monkeypox as a biological weapon instead of smallpox," Ken Alibek, who was former deputy chief of the Soviet biological weapons program and now resides in the U.S., told UPI.

Monkeypox, which causes symptoms similar to smallpox, can be fatal, but only in the minority of cases, said James LeDuc, director of the division of viral and rickettsial diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. He said he is "not aware of any cases outside" Africa.

The World Health Organization attributes the increase in monkeypox cases in Africa to the fact that smallpox vaccines, which can protect against monkeypox, are no longer administered.

LeDuc said it is uncertain whether the disease is on the increase, but he noted there appears to have been an outbreak of the disease in Africa about 6 months ago.

The "real fear is that (monkeypox) might be engineered as a bioweapon," said Jonathan Tucker, a former weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission who is now with the think tank Monterey Institute in Washington.

Monkeypox is not as contagious as smallpox, but whether it could be or has been modified to be more virulent is unknown. The Soviets were not concerned with contagiousness, Alibek said, because they planned to produce "tons and tons" of the virus -- enough to infect "hundred of thousands of people or even more."

Tucker noted the smallpox vaccine will protect against both monkeypox and camelpox, but Americans do not have access to this vaccine. The CDC, which holds a stockpile of the smallpox vaccine, is currently reconsidering its vaccination strategy and whether to vaccinate everyone or wait until there is an outbreak and try to vaccinate only those exposed.

There are concerns that Russia's smallpox may have been leaked to terrorists, and whether something similar happened with monkeypox is uncertain. Another former U.N. weapons inspector, who requested anonymity, told UPI "There's no confirmation that (monkeypox) leaked out, but the potential exists."

Alibek said he had no idea whether monkeypox had ever been leaked out of the Soviet program. But he noted that from the 1970s until the 1990s, "it was not a problem to get any of the orthopox viruses (smallpox, camelpox and monkeypox)," and many countries had access to them if they wanted them.

Iraq is one of the rogue states that may have obtained access to monkeypox. "We've never ever gotten to the bottom of their involvement with camelpox, whether they were really trying to weaponize it or it was a façade for working with smallpox or monkeypox," said the former U.N. inspector, who was a member of the team that went into Iraq.

There is a lot of suspicion that Iraq had access to smallpox, but "there's no such indirect evidence for monkeypox," the inspector said. Asked if monkeypox was less of a concern than smallpox, the inspector replied, "I wouldn't say it's of less concern ... The fact that we haven't come across evidence from the United Nations doesn't mean it's not there."

No U.N. weapons inspectors have been in Iraq since 1998, so unless the government acknowledges working with a particular biological agent it is difficult to know for certain whether they ever worked with it. No one has any idea what types of agents they have worked with in the past three years, the inspector said.

Iraq is "likely to work with any nasty that comes along" and the government has shown an interest "in all the orthopox viruses," so "it's a strong possibility that they were" working with monkeypox, the inspector said.

The good news is that monkeypox does not appear to be transmissible from person to person and the smallpox vaccine protects against it. Asked whether monkeypox could be modified so that the vaccine is not effective against it, the former weapons inspector said, "I would say that verges on the impossible."

Alibek noted, "There was no such work in getting it resistant to vaccine. I cannot say anything for sure about what they are doing now." Alibek said he left the program more than 10 years ago.

"Making it elusive to the vaccine would be a challenge," CDC's LeDuc said. "The position that we've always held is that it would be very difficult to overcome the vaccine by genetic engineering."

However, Alibek added, "Existent vaccines are not 100 percent effective" against smallpox. They only offer approximately 70 percent protection. "Against monkeypox, the protection could be even lower," he said. "So even if everybody is vaccinated against smallpox, it doesn't mean everybody is protected."

Monkeypox virus causes big stir on farm

By GRAEME ZIELINSKI

gzielinski@journalsentinel.com@journalse

Last Updated: June 10, 2003

Dorchester - Schyan had a fever. Nothing too serious for a 3-year-old, thought her mother, Tammy Kautzer. But better to be safe, so she took the girl to the Abbotsford clinic a few miles away.

At the end of a routine examination, Kautzer mentioned offhandedly that the little girl had been nipped on the right index finger a few days before by a cranky prairie dog purchased at a 4-H pet swap in Wausau. "It didn't seem like a big deal," said Kautzer, a warehouse worker in a nearby Tombstone Pizza plant.

Weeks later, things have become a big deal.

The Kautzers are quarantined in their farmhouse, epidemiologists are scrambling around the Midwest and monkeypox, a viral disease related to smallpox, has grabbed the headlines.

Meanwhile, back at the little farm on Pine Road where the first confirmed case of the disease was reported, Tammy Kautzer, 28, and her husband of seven years, Steve, 38, are recovering with their only daughter from the rare illness, killing time until they are allowed to leave their home. That will be in a few days, when the scabs fall off.

On Monday, Tammy was sorting through a horse trailer filled with heirlooms. Steve was mowing the lawn. And Schyan (pronounced like Cheyenne) was swinging in her backyard amid the braying of a Noah's Ark-full of animals and the buzzing of media types who have swarmed over the Kautzers' 5-acre plot to learn more about the origins of the illness.

Big excitement for these parts, said Steve Kautzer, a laborer at the Northwest Hardwoods sawmill nearby, something to rival the Fourth of July. The doctors have told them to avoid human contact. They stocked up on the essentials, and a case of Miller Genuine Draft, before medical officials asked them to stay at home.

Schyan, with stark blue eyes and bolts of flowing red hair, squirmed on a pet carrier that housed Chuckles, a second prairie dog also ill from monkeypox. The Kautzers have decided to keep Chuckles because it is believed they are immune from contracting the disease again.

Schyan sucked her thumb and displayed the wound, a discolored lesion, from the first prairie dog that is thought to have infected her.

She had been handling the animal a few weeks ago when it was showing signs of being ill, its eyes crusted over. As she was putting the animal back in its cage, it bit her.

Schyan's wound was fine at first, but it soon grew and became discolored, her mother said.

The prairie dog had been found dead the day of the trip to the clinic, Tammy Kautzer said, so she was told by a worried doctor to retrieve it from the garbage. By that point, the possibility of rabies, or even bubonic plague, was on the table.

"They sent the head to Madison and the lymph nodes to St. Joseph's (Hospital in Marshfield)," Tammy Kautzer said.

Meanwhile, their daughter's condition worsened, and she was admitted to St. Joseph's. Soon afterward, both parents got lesions. Steve's tracked up his arms; some are still visible on the left one, framing a big tattoo of the Tasmanian Devil in Green Bay Packers garb throttling a Minnesota Viking.

They were told that they could have contracted the virus from kissing their daughter's boo-boo. Tammy Kautzer also may have gotten it from an open cat scratch on her hand.

During the explanation of the events, Schyan interrupted to provide an inventory of the menagerie kept at the home, off a ribbon of dirt road in dairy country, on the eastern edge of an Old Order Mennonite community.

"I got horses and donkeys and goats and puppies and cats," she said.

They got the prairie dogs from a vendor at a Mother's Day event in Wausau. In all, they have about 30 animals now. Tammy Kautzer sells some of the animals she raises and was doing so at the swap meet, she said.

She is the big pet lover. "I don't remember a time in my life when I didn't have a pet," she said.

Her husband seemed a bit ambivalent. "I won't say I hate animals," he said with an easy smile.

Tammy Kautzer said she had owned three prairie dogs about five years ago, about the time they bought the farm. They were friendly critters - one would roll over on his back and wait for his stomach to be scratched. So when she bought two for $95 apiece, she had no reason to suspect they would be ornery - or infected by another exotic animal, she said.

"I thought they were captive raised," she said. She later was told that they actually were captured somewhere in the Dakotas three weeks before.

"I didn't know that they had been sucked out of the ground," she said.

Where the animals came from is a matter of dispute.

At one point Monday, Tammy Kautzer was on the phone with the husband of the seller, who was angry that she had been identified in print by Kautzer and had threatened to sue. The husband was calling to smooth things over.

The Kautzers said they weren't worried about getting sick again. Neither are the agencies they've spoken with, they said.

Besides burning the bedding of the prairie dog that lived and minding their scabs as they fall off, all they can do is wait.

"They told us that it's the pox," Tammy Kautzer said, with a self-conscious laugh. "Once we have it, we're immune to it. I hope so. Because once you have it, it's a nasty little circle."

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