The Baltimore Sun carried a brief story over the weekend that suggests the U.S. government’s response to biological weapons fears might be worse than the weapons themselves. I have not seen this reported elsewhere, but the Sun reported that the U.S. Army has been conducting smallpox research over the past couple years, including infecting monkeys with a fatal form of the disease.
On the one hand, from a pure science perspective, this is an interesting advance. Although it exists in other species, only human beings typically die from small pox. That researchers have been able to create an animal model is an indication of just how far medical research techniques have progressed in the last 30 years.
On the other hand, the Sun quotes a couple prominent public health experts denouncing the research, and their case is compelling.
At the moment, the fear of a country using smallpox on the United States is largely hypothetical. We know the Soviet Union had weapons that it had outfitted with smallpox and aimed at the United States, but the Soviet threat is over and to my knowledge there are no credible reports of terrorists or anyone else possessing smallpox.
In that sort of situation, as Dr. Alfred Sommer, dean of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Baltimore Sun, research into smallpox may be the biggest smallpox threat for a number of reasons.
First, if the United States begins conducting research on smallpox, other countries will inevitably follow. The worst possible scenario is if countries around the world gear up for smallpox research. Maybe the United States can prevent smallpox in the hands of the U.S. Army from being stolen by terrorists, but what happens when India, Pakistan, Malaysia and other countries start emulating the U.S. research? It would seem to me the last thing the in the world the United States would want to do now is create conditions that promote smallpox research.
Second, smallpox research itself may pose unacceptable risks. The Soviet Union and the United States should have destroyed all remaining stocks of the disease when they had a chance. Now, aside from terrorists stealing such stocks, the largest risk to human populations is an accidental release. The odds of an accidental release from the Army experiments might be extremely low, but considering the possible outcomes of such a release combined with the limited benefit of learning more about a deadly disease that has already been eradicated — it is difficult to fathom why such research is being allowed to continue.
Source:
Scientists divided over smallpox research on monkeys. The Baltimore Sun, February 3, 2002.
You make a good point as to why the research is being done vs lab accident risk, but how would other countries follow us? Other countries do not have smallpox to do research with in the first place.
@Josh: “Other countries do not have smallpox to do research with in the first place.”
Both the United States and Russia continue to maintain known stocks of smallpox virus. Leaving aside the increasing trend back toward reestablishment of an illiberal regime in Russia, it would be more accurate to say that other countries are not supposed to have smallpox.
As we now know, the USSR engaged in very large scale production of smallpox virus which they intended to use as a weapon against the West. Given general poor control of military assets during the final days of the USSR combined with the very large amounts of smallpox virus involved, it’s hardly outside the realm of probability that the samples of the virus may have found its way into the hands of other nations states (certainly a country like North Korea would have been more than happy to receive it).
See, for example, this story.