Smallpox was an ancient disease that had hit communities around the world hard for more than 10,000 years. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), this was so deadly that it would have been responsible for more than 300 million deaths in the 20th century alone.
1980 smallpox (smallpox, in English) the first and so far only infectious disease in humans has been eradicated, but this does not mean that the pathogen has disappeared from the face of the earth. There are two laboratories around the world that still hold samples of the virus.
The first is the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of Atlanta (USA), which stores 350 logs. The second is the VECTOR laboratory of the Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo (Novosibirsk, Russia), which stores about 120.
Both laboratories work together with the WHO and are inspected every two years by biosafety experts from this institution.
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What is tested for smallpox?
Both labs preserve smallpox samples for various scientific purposes. These include improving diagnostic methods for the virus, sequencing the genome of all its strains, or developing a new generation of drugs or more effective and safer vaccines
In 2018, according to an article in The Conversation, there were up to 10 research projects involving this virus at both labs.
One result of the investigation is tecovirimatethe first drug to treat smallpox to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2018. In the past, the only way to combat the disease was to relieve the patient’s symptoms and let them run their course until they disappeared.
Likewise, the WHO estimates that there are between 570 and 720 million doses of the smallpox vaccine stored worldwide, so millions more could easily be manufactured should an outbreak occur.
This arsenal of cans could even stem the spread of monkeypox, a pathogen in the same family as smallpox viruses (vaccinia viruses), called orthopoxviruses.
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Is it dangerous to keep smallpox samples in labs?
The preservation of smallpox samples has not been spared controversy, and it has even been proposed that the existing remains be disposed of without much success due to a possible terrorist attack, a possibility that the main public health organizations in the United States are not ruling out.
In fact, the last case of smallpox was in Birmingham, UK, in 1978 and was due to accidental exposure in a laboratory. This came a year after the world’s last natural infection was recorded in Somalia.
Likewise, in 2019 there was an explosion at the Russian VECTOR laboratory, which could endanger the health of several people due to the exposure of smallpox samples.