Health officials have been debating for a decade whether to destroy or preserve the last remaining samples of smallpox--held in secure vaults in the United States and Russia. The U.S. government this week ended the dithering: It will save its stocks for research, says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who participated in Administration discussions.
Fauci says he's argued "for a couple of years that we should retain smallpox" for purely scientific reasons. "We need it to develop animal models of the disease, to conduct in vitro assays of new drug therapies and diagnostic tests, and to completely sequence various strains" for defense against potential variant forms, as well as a new vaccine. It was "verging on naïve," Fauci thinks, to assume--as a World Health Organization (WHO) plan for smallpox destruction did--that the only extant samples were those in official U.S. and Russian labs. He fears some Russian stocks may have fallen into "nefarious" hands.
The WHO's plan called for destruction of official smallpox samples by 2002. That agenda has now been nixed by U.S. bioterrorism concerns. Ironically, a chief designer of the defunct WHO plan is D. A. Henderson, a former smallpox fighter who recently became the top bioterrorism expert for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Henderson could not be reached.
