It’s been more than 30 years since the World Health Organization announced it had eradicated smallpox. The once fatal disease was the plague of post-Middle Ages Europe and a scourge for centuries, affecting literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
So why are we still talking about smallpox?
In an April Wall Street Journal article reporter Betsy McKay discusses the future of the smallpox disease. I did a double take when I started reading the piece. Wasn’t smallpox eradication one of the greatest feats of modern medicine?
But further research proved that in a post-9/11 world where the threat of terrorism still looms large in the minds of governments worldwide, smallpox remains on the map as a serious threat to national security. In fact, the Center for Disease Control has more than 300 million smallpox vaccinations in storage ready for the willing in the unfortunate scenario that someone release a strand.
See, smallpox – while it was formally eradicated as a naturally occurring disease in the global population in 1980 – didn’t just disappear into thin air. Several governments kept a stock of the disease in storage for research purposes.
But McKay’s WSJ story reports that the World Health Assembly voted in May on whether to demand the U.S. and Russia, two countries who continue to hold a stock of smallpox in a laboratory for research purposes, get rid of remaining stockpiles.
Since this blog’s first draft, the Health Assembly voted to allow the two countries to keep smallpox around; it’s locked away in secure laboratories, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Officials in both countries must be relieved they can keep smallpox – they were lobbying against efforts to make them get rid of the remaining stockpiles.
In 1796, when Edward Jenner successfully vaccinated the first person – his own one-year-old son, against smallpox, the world was offered a breakthrough like none other. It was granted the ability to terminate a deadly disease that puzzled populations for centuries – stretching back to rulers of Egyptian dynasties over 3,000 years ago.
In a podcast on the CDC website about the bioterror threat of smallpox, an official says it best:
“It’s incredibly ironic that the great public health triumph of eradicating smallpox in the 1970s, and the discontinuation of worldwide vaccination, have opened the door for this virus to once again be used as a weapon.”
If a bioterrorist were to unleash a smallpox strand on a given population, it would have severe consequences because people have not been vaccinated against the virus. A troubling stat from the CDC: It would only take less than 100 introductions of smallpox to threaten health on a global scale. We do live in a globalized society, as we are well aware.
David Evans, a researcher and smallpox expert at the University of Alberta, says a smallpox release wouldn’t cause the worldwide devastation that, say the Black Plague unleashed.
“You could stop smallpox fairly quickly with the techniques and technology we have today,” Evans said.
Having said that, a release would cause serious public health concern. There would be many casualties.
“I’m not minimizing the chaos and deaths it would cause if it got out,” Evans said.
The World Health Organization keeps a small stockpile of smallpox vaccination, according to its website. Read more about how the WHO prepares for a smallpox outbreak.
