Posted on 11/05/2001 8:28:53 AM PST by kattracks
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MOSCOW, Nov 5 (Reuters) - Former Soviet germ warfare scientists, warning that rogue powers could lure underpaid Russian researchers, called on Monday for wide reintroduction of worldwide vaccination against the now extinct smallpox virus. "It is a very dangerous weapon in the hands of terrorists and...you don't need some clever way of delivering it," said Lev Sandakhchiyev, director of Russia's Vektor Institute, which holds one of the world's two official samples of smallpox. "All you need is a sick fanatic to get to a populated place," he told a news conference in Moscow. "The world health system is completely unprepared for this." Officials declared smallpox eradicated worldwide in 1981 and have since stopped inoculating people against an illness that had killed countless millions throughout human history. But authorities in the United States and elsewhere now fear the disease might reappear if individuals like the mystery attackers mailing anthrax to Americans were to get their hands on smallpox. Four people have died so far in the United States. Sandakhchiyev said scientists at Vektor earn just about $100 a month and so some could -- in theory -- be tempted financially by outsiders looking to acquire germ warfare expertise. "Everything is possible in today's world," he told Reuters in a later interview. "If the question is 'Do Russian scientists work in Iran or Iraq?' my answer is no. Do Iraqis work at Vektor? The answer is no," he said of two states Washington says sponsor terrorism. "But only the devil knows with whom they meet. Our scientists sit at international conferences as part of large government delegations with a large team from Vektor." But he added that the institute's collection of germ warfare agents was protected: "We do have a security system against terrorism and attacks on the collection and our site and we have a controlled entry. People don't just show up there by chance."
WIDE VACCINATION NEEDED Anatoly Vorobyov, a former Soviet general and a leader of Moscow's secret bioweapons programme in the 1980s, said smallpox posed the greatest health risk among biological weapons because it is highly contagious once one person is infected. "In principle, the whole population needs to be vaccinated, not only in the United States but in Russia and everywhere in the world," he said. The United States has started vaccinating a small number of medical workers against smallpox amid growing fears of a possible re-emergence of the disease. The virus kills at least 30 percent of unvaccinated victims. The warnings from the veteran Russian scientists are especially chilling given their extensive experience. In a recent book Soviet germ warfare research, one of Moscow's former top bioweapons scientists Ken Alibek, says the Vektor institute tested a smallpox weapon in 1990. Since 1994, Sadakhchiyev's laboratory in Siberia has held one of the world's two sanctioned smallpox samples. Atlanta's Centers for Disease Control in the United States has the other. Western intelligence services suspect some nations including Iraq and North Korea may also have stocks of the smallpox virus, a highly infectious disease that brings a rash and high fever.
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Iraq may have been working overtime to develop this weapon of mass destruction.
"Everything is possible in today's world," he told Reuters in a later interview.
That's my question, too. Often--not always, but often--when the same theme appears many times, it's as though someone is trying to prepare the populace for something that's about to happen. I pray that is not the case with smallpox. And I won't even get into how angry I get every time I think how simple it would have been to prevent something like smallpox, if only they hadn't gotten naively overconfident and quit making the vaccination.
Blackpox is an especially viralent form of smallpox with no ebola added.
Also the literature states that the smallpox-ebola combination did not work as they expected. Particularly nasty death, but patients died so fast the disease did not spread.
Therefor, it is not considered a viable weapon.
Regards, Lurking"
Good information on blackpox, background on who has the virus, discounts the notion that only US and Russia have access to it.
Statement for the Record by Richard Preston Before The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism & Government Information and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:
Chemical and Biological Weapons Threats to America: Are We Prepared?
This is from April, 1998. Contains information about blackpox. One section in particular caught my attention:
In a military release of smallpox, the victims would be receiving extremely high doses of smallpox, far higher than in a natural outbreak, and we can suspect that many of the victims would be developing blackpox and having smallpox bleedouts. Blackpox is even more contagious than so-called ordinary smallpox.
Yeah, that was REAL intelligent.
Is this a tacit admission that yes, indeed, they have had some of their smallpox samples stolen?
Our CDC has its head in the sand on this one. It is the same bunch that totally dropped the ball on the AIDS epidemic.
In a technical sense it was true that the exiting 184 year-old (in 1980) vaccine did have too high risk of complications given the lack of smallpox in the wild. There are complications including encephalitis, and even death. Although these occur at low levels, innoculating everyone in a population in order to protect against an extinct disease will produce a number of injured people. The solution should be to develop new vaccines that are safer than the existing live vaccina vaccine. The technology for vaccines has improved greatly since 1796 when Jenner introduced vaccination.
An example of the tradeoffs between risks and benefits of different vaccines for one disease are the two vaccines for polio. The first vaccine (1955) was the killed Salk vaccine. The second (1961) was attenuated live Sabin vaccine. There was a vicious academic debate about which vaccine is safer or effective. It is often said that academic politics are viscious because the stakes are so low but in this case, the stakes were extremely high. Theoretically the killed vaccine should not cause the disease, but an early batch made by a licensee who did not completely follow Dr. Salk's protocol for killing the virus, caused an outbreak. The Sabin vaccine was tested in Africa with the assistance of the Soviet Union. There were some serious questions about the methodology of the study. The Soviets did not count any case of polio contracted less than 14 days after receiving the vaccine as being caused by the vaccine. Dr. Sabin was awarded the Nobel prize for medicine, but Dr. Salk did not share in it.
It was believed that the live oral vaccine is more effective in creating a life long immunity to polio. It is cheaper to manufacture, acts faster, and also has the ability to secondarily innoculate others who may come into contact with feces or water cominated by the feces of the recipient. Because of the ability to spread the effect of the vaccine beyond the person being inoculated, it was believed to be better for stopping outbreaks especially in less developed countries. The major problem is that about once in every 2.4 million cases the virus reverts back to pathogenic form and causes polio in the recipient. It also can cause the disease in others who may come in contact with the feces of the recipient. The last case of wild polio in the US occurred in 1979. After the 1980s almost every case of polio in the US was caused by the live vaccine; the others were aquired outside the US. There were several lawsuits in the 1980s and the protocols were changed so that the first two doses would be the inactivated or killed vaccine followed by two doses of the live vaccine.
The CDC's website says that the new protocol for 2000 is for four doses of an improved inactivated vaccine. The purpose of of this protocol is to totally eliminate the possibility of vaccine-caused polio. This is especially important since the wild virus does not exist in this country! The WHO is now in the process of eradicating polio from the world!
There are two major points I want to make about this digression about polio. First the safety of a vaccine for an extinct disease or at least extinct in this country has to be much higher than for a disease that is endemic or epidemic. Second, if a disease is eradicated in the wild, there is absolutely no way to verify that there are no undocumented samples of that disease in a laboratory. If we stop vaccinating, then future generations will become vulnerable to the use of polio as a biolgical weapon. I doubt very seriously after this scare about smallpox that citizens of the US would let the WHO and CDC stop the manufacture of polio vaccine when polio is eradicated in the wild. The WHO hopes to eradicate other diseases such as measles. This is a great thing for humanity, but we should never again make our population vulnerable to extinct diseases that could be used as biological weapons. We need to have research into producing vaccines that are much safer than the currently availabe ones for diseases that are targeted for extinction. This way we can justify vaccinating almost all the population against these diseases. If the overwhelming majority of people in this country and other highly developed countries were immune to smallpox, there would be no incentive for terrorists to use it.
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