Hmmmmm....
And if it is real, then there's some "splain'in to do, Lucy."
The upside would be, at least we'd have a clue as to the genetic disposition of the smallpox the enemy has.
Except for cultures thought to be secured in Russia, North Korea, and places in the US where we keep other such things like Anthrax secured!
Because there would be many deaths. Headlines would not read "Smallpox Spreading..." but rather "Smallpox deaths kills hundreds...." Chickenpox is pretty scary in a medically isolated population.
I seem to remember the first case of Anthrax here in this country the health officials and media tried to pass it off as the editors' trip into the woods.
This is probably Chicken Pox, but I have to say the health authorities would probably try to down play any real Smallpox outbreak.
The residents of Naro Banda, a rural area in the district, told this correspondent that a majority of the children in the village had suffered from smallpox a few years back. "My two brothers, Shams and Akhtar, have been afflicted by smallpox and I have appealed to the officials concerned, but they did not bother either to visit the area or take steps for controlling it," said Mukhtaj Ahmad of Naro Banda.Yeah, duh, and this smallpox incident "a few years back" involving a MAJORITY of the children would have made headlines also.
That's all they have been talking about in regard to the shortage of syrum(sp); the fact that the disease had been TOTALLY IRADICATED a long time ago.
THIS is outrageous and scary. Fortunate timing that we finally have Homeland Security well in place and ready perhaps to send a HAZMAT TIPS information sheet to the citizens, like they issue to the military, for their safety.
< /sarcasm
The US government keeps a list of nations and groups that it suspects either have clandestine stocks of smallpox or seem to be trying to buy or steal the virus. The list is classified, but it is said to include Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Serbia, terrorist organization of Osama bin Laden and, possibly, the Aum Shinrikyo sect of Japan.
Ken Alibek, who was once Kanatjan Alibekov, a leading Soviet bioweaponeer and the inventor of the world's most powerful anthrax, defected, in 1992, and revealed how far the Soviet Union had gone with bioweapons. Alibek says that there were twenty tons of liquid smallpox kept on hand at Soviet military bases.
In 1989, a Soviet biologist named Vladimir Pasechnik defected to Britain. British intelligence spent a year debriefing him. By the end, the British agents felt they had confirmed that the U.S.S.R. had biological missiles aimed at the US. This information reached President George Bush and the British PM Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher then apparently confronted the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. She was furious, and so was Bush. Gorbachev responded by allowing a small, secret team of American and British bioweapons inspectors to tour Soviet biowarfare facilities. In January of 1991, the inspectors travelled across the U.S.S.R., getting whirlwind looks at some of the major clandestine bases of the Soviet biowarfare program, which was called Biopreparat. The inspectors were frightened by what they discovered. ("I would describe it as scary, and I feel a responsibility to tell the world medical community about what I saw, because doctors could face these diseases," said one inspector, Frank Malinoski, M.D., Ph.D.) On January 14th, the team arrived at Vector, the main virology complex, in Siberia, and the next day, they were shown into a laboratory called Building 6, where one of the inspectors, David Kelly, took a technician aside and asked him what virus they had been working with. The technician said that they had been working with smallpox. Kelly repeated the question three times. Three times, he asked the technician, "You mean you were working with Variola major?" and he emphasized to the technician that his answer was very important. The technician responded emphatically that it was Variola major [the killer strain]. Kelly says that his interpreter was the best Russian interpreter the British government has. "There was no ambiguity," Kelly says. The inspectors were stunned. Vector was not supposed to have any smallpox at all, much less be working with it -- a supreme violation of rules set down by the W.H.O.
Per Malinoski: "There were tons of smallpox virus made in the Soviet Union. The Russians admitted that to us. One of the Vector leaders when he said to us, 'Listen, we didn't account for every ampule of the virus. We had large quantities of it on hand. There were plenty of opportunities for staff members to walk away with an ampule. Although we think we know where our formerly employed scientists are, we can't account for all of them-we don't know where all of them are.' " Today, smallpox and its protocols could be anywhere in the world.
Sitting with D. A. Henderson [widely credited with the eradication of smallpox ] in his house, I mentioned what seemed to be the great and tragic paradox of his life's work. The eradication caused the human species to lose its immunity to smallpox, and that was what made it possible for the Soviets to turn smallpox into a weapon rivalling the hydrogen bomb.
Henderson responded with silence, and then said thoughtfully, "I feel very sad about this. The eradication never would have succeeded without the Russians. Viktor Zhdanov [who first raised the idea] started it, and they did so much. They were extremely proud of what they had done. I felt the virus was in good hands with the Russians. I never would have suspected. They made twenty tons -- twenty tons -- of smallpox. For us to have come so far with the disease, and now to have to deal with this human creation, when there are so many other problems in the world . . ." He was quiet again. "It's a great letdown," he said.
Immune people are like control rods in a nuclear reactor. The American population has little immunity [the vaccination begins wears off after 10 years], so it's a reactor with no control rods. We could have an uncontrolled smallpox chain reaction." This would be something that terrorism experts refer to as a "soft kill" of the United States of America.
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/598296/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/559244/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/553011/posts
This was a unilaterial declaration by the UN and the CDC - until more cases cropped up in Africa. There is no way to prove smallpox has been eradicated until we can examine everyone in every geographical location over their entire lifetimes.
It's a good bet that smallpox still exisits in many areas around the world. Most likely remote locations in Africa and Asia as well as in the slums of cities in those areas.
When i saw the headline of this article i was about to panic and go into hysterics...however i sat down and wondered 'how come this thing was not breaking news?' Think about it...the re-emergence of small pox as an epidemic would probably be the biggest news event in almost two decades due to the severe ramifications!
That is when i disregarded the article as fake!
Just heard about this on Alex Jones' show. Would they tell us on the front page?