Dark Winter - smallpox

Eradicated in1987 yet game played 2001!

Weird that the LAST SAMPLES, 1987,of smallpox were in possession of the United states and Russia.

Last Samples Of Smallpox Pose a Quandary

TEN years after smallpox ceased to exist as a human disease, virus experts and public health officials are in a strange and unprecedented quandary: what to do with the last surviving smallpox viruses.

These viruses, the most fearsome endangered species on earth, exist today in only two places, high security laboratories in Moscow and at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

Now, on the 10th anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, the experts are questioning whether or not those last stocks of variola virus - the cause of smallpox - should finally be destroyed.

No scientist is working with viable variola virus or is likely to be allowed to do so, said Dr. Keith Dumbell, of University of Cape Town, in South Africa, writing in The Lancet, a medical journal.

To the best of our knowledge, he added, destruction of all remaining laboratory stocks of variola virus would set the final seal on the attempt to rid the world of this infectious scourge.

But some specialists have argued that the virus should not be erased altogether from the world, partly because unforeseen research uses might arise in the future and partly simply because once it was destroyed, it could never be raised from extinction. Philosophically, the deliberate extinction of a species would be an unprecedented step.

But this is a species that, over thousands of years, has killed many millions of people and has spread panic and destruction in its wake, often killing one in five of those infected in any outbreak and disfiguring many of the survivors.

Now the only surviving representatives of the virus are stored in little vials kept in freezer lockers at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit, waiting only for some hypothetical future use.

The high security laboratory in Moscow is now used mainly for diagnostic work on the AIDS virus, according to a doctor who visited there recently. The laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control is also used for other purposes.

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https://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/03/science/last-samples-of-smallpox-pose-a-quandary.html