Smallpox Concerns

 
In light of recent speculation regarding the possible use of the smallpox virus in bioterrorist attacks, researchers at St. Louis University said they had been asked to study a smallpox vaccine. Smallpox was officially eradicated through a mass vaccination program 20 years ago. The World Health Organization declared the world free of the smallpox virus in 1980 after routine vaccinations eradicated the disease. Concern centers around being able to marshall enough antidote should an outbreak of smallpox occur.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta has asked the St Louis University School of Medicine Center for Vaccine Development in Missouri, to determine the safety and effectiveness of some of the small, remaining supply of the smallpox vaccine known as Dryvax (no longer produced). Initial research will study the effectiveness of diluted doses of the remaining supplies of Dryvax to be disseminated in the event of a bioterrorist attack.

Associate professor of infectious diseases and immunology at the university’s Medicine Center for Vaccine Development, Sharon Frey. Frey, who is leading the study, stated “Being able to dilute the vaccine would potentially increase the available stock by 10 to 100 fold,” said Frey. Frey estimated there were about seven million Dryvax doses available in the United States—far short of what would be needed to inoculate the current U.S. population of
270 million in the event of a smallpox outbreak. “There is a limited amount of supply and the point of this is to see how much we can dilute the vaccine to see how many available doses we could really have in the event of an attack,” Frey said. She added that the United States government, the military and others were doing research to find other vaccines against smallpox. “Our research will be an interim step between what we have now in terms of stocks and finding a new vaccine,” she said.

If the smallpox virus were released via an aerosol at a crowded place such as a sports stadium or a political event. Frey states, “We guesstimate that if one person is infected they can, in turn, infect 25 people...You can imagine with air travel how easily we could have a pandemic on our hands.” With smallpox, it takes about two weeks before people begin to show symptoms and by that time the virus would be on its way to being spread nationwide and beyond.

Last year, experts from the WHO recommended further research on the virus before the world’s only known remaining stocks of smallpox in the United States and Russia were destroyed. The stocks, kept in high-security laboratories at the CDC in Atlanta and at the Russian State Center for Research on Virology and Biotechnology in Novosibirsk, were to have been destroyed last June 30. President Clinton announced last April that he would seek a delay in destroying the stocks because of fears the disease may be spread through terrorist attacks.

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