Decades-old smallpox found in lab storage room near D.C.
National Institutes of Health workers preparing to move a lab in Bethesda, Md., found an unwelcome surprise in a storage room this month: vials of smallpox.
There is no evidence that any of the vials was breached, and no lab workers or members of the publicwere exposed to the infectious and potentially deadly virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday.
The vials labeled variola — a name for the smallpox virus — were found July 1 “in an unused portion of a storage room” and seem to date to the 1950s, the CDC said. They were immediately put into a containment lab, then moved Monday to the CDC’s containment facility in Atlanta, it said.
The samples are being tested to see whether any of them are viable — that is, can grow, theCDCsaid.
There is no evidence that any vial containing the virus was breached.
The agency said it has notified the World Health Organization about the discovery. If the specimens turn out to be viable, the CDC said it will invite officials from the world health agency to witness the destruction of the samples.
The most common type of smallpox is serious, contagious and frequently fatal, with about 30 percent of cases resulting in death, according to the CDC. However, the disease was declared eradicated in 1980 after a worldwide vaccination program.
The last U.S.
case
of smallpox was in 1949, and the last naturally occurring case anywhere in the world was in Somalia in 1977, according to theCDC. Since then, according to the WorldHealth Organization, the only known cases stemmed from a 1978 lab accident in England.
By international agreement, live smallpox samples are supposed to be held in only two places worldwide: one at the CDC in Atlanta and the other near Novosibirsk, Russia. A debate has been taking place in recent years over whether (or when) to destroy the last living strains of the virus. Some argue that the disease could re-emerge, so virus samples are needed to conduct research that would protect the public. Others argue that keeping live samples is the very thing ensuring smallpox is not fully wiped out.