At a May meeting of the World Health Assembly - a gathering of delegates from all WHO member states - the United States and Russia will once again face a clamour, led by African countries, to eliminate the last known live samples of the smallpox virus - 30 years after the WHO declared it eradicated. Unfortunately, humanity cannot dispense with this destroyer of life so easily.
The scourge is believed to have killed more people over the millennia than any other, its victims running into the hundreds of millions. Legions more were blinded and permanently disfigured. The last natural outbreaks occurred in Africa as late as the 1970s, within living memory, and it is understandable that African countries are pushing most vehemently to bring about its extinction.
The fact of smallpox's survival three decades after its eradication through a global program of vaccination, even in maximum-containment, "biosafety level 4" laboratories at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and at a research institution in Russia, constitutes a real and constant danger. But the elimination of the live virus would not remove that threat. On the contrary, it might serve in a perverse way to exacerbate it.
Live viruses might well persist in unknown laboratories, or even, it has been theorized, lie in wait in permafrost cemeteries. It is also possible that the virus could be artificially reconstructed and used in a bioterrorism attack. For that reason, the U.S. ordered the emergency production of 168 million doses of smallpox vaccine after Sept. 11, 2001, and continues to add to its stocks.
This is not bioterror hysteria. It is a sensible precaution. Such a threat is much greater than any risk posed by the collections maintained at two WHO-authorized high-security laboratories. These samples, frozen in liquid nitrogen, are the source of anxiety for those who want to declare total victory in the war against smallpox. But such chest-thumping would harm research into the human immune system, and undermine the capacity of science to identify and research antiviral agents and next-generation vaccines. Surely this is a case of its being better to know thy enemy.