Posted on 06/17/2002 5:17:52 PM PDT by Nebullis
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In 1971, a Soviet biological weapons test caused an outbreak of smallpox in a nearby town, and three deaths. The accident, confirmed for the first time, suggests the current smallpox vaccine would work against the smallpox used in Soviet weapons, the type thought most likely to have fallen into terrorist hands. The report was presented on Saturday to a US government committee advising on whether authorities should offer smallpox vaccinations to the public amid growing fears of bioterrorism. Their decision is expected this week. Smallpox has been extinct in the wild since 1980. In 1959, universal vaccination had driven it from Moscow. But that year a traveller from India returned carrying the infection, and passed it to 46 people. Soviet authorities re-vaccinated 6.6 million Muscovites, heading off a widespread outbreak. The strain of smallpox was highly virulent. The carrier had been vaccinated, but his immunity had waned over time. He showed no symptoms, but still managed to acquire and transmit the virus, again mainly to previously-vaccinated people. Soviet scientists isolated the strain in India in 1967. By the mid-1970s, they were producing and weaponising 20 tonnes of India-1967 smallpox per year. This enormous stockpile is considered the most likely source of any smallpox now in terrorist hands.
In 1971, the Soviets were testing smallpox aerosols at their main bioweapons testing range, Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea, according to the report by Jonathan Tucker and colleagues at the Monterey Institute for International Studies in Washington. It will be published later this month. A fisheries research vessel passed closer to the island than regulations allowed during the test, and a young female biologist working on deck was infected. She came down with smallpox later in the port town of Aralsk. A total of twelve people there became ill, the town was quarantined and 50,000 people were re-vaccinated. The three who died, a woman and two small children, had never been vaccinated. The rest had been, and although they fell ill, they survived. That, plus the fact that mass vaccination stopped the outbreak, "supports the effectivceness of the current vaccine," says Richard Ebright, a virologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Al Zelicoff of Sandia National Laboratories, who presented the report to the committee in Washington, disagrees. He says a detailed analysis of the Aralsk outbreak shows the virus defeated the vaccine more readily than earlier studies of natural smallpox suggest. He says this should now be studied more carefully. The strain involved seems likely to have been India-1967. The Russian vaccine was similar to the US type, of which 300 million doses are to be stockpiled by next year as a bioterrorism defense. The observations are a direct test of how well smallpox immunity persists in a population vaccinated in infancy, and not regularly exposed to circulating virus, the situation for most people since the 1980s. They suggest better persistence than the only other recent test, of skin reactions to re-vaccination among virologists, now among the few who get the vaccine. Fewer than ten per cent showed signs of protection, but the test revealed only some kinds of immunity. |
And I'm sorry, but the conclusions of this account (that our vaccine will be effective against any Soviet smallpox virus the terrorists can get their hands on, etc.) don't seem logical to me. According to Ken Alibek (Alibekov), who in essence, ran the Soviet bioweapons arm for several years in the late 80's, the Soviets were working on shortening the incubation period, among other things. They may well have developed a much more sophisticated smallpox variant than what was accidentally unleashed in the the above 1971(?) incident. Alibek's book is a really good read.
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