Soviet Smallpox Outbreak Report Worries Experts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Experts said on Saturday they were worried by a leaked report that describes an outbreak of smallpox in the Soviet Union -- one they say may point to the testing of a smallpox biological weapon.

Seven people became ill in the 1971 outbreak and three died of what appeared to be the more fatal, and more rare, hemorrhagic form of the infection, said Dr. Alan Zelicoff of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, one of the authors of the report.

"Someone has successfully disseminated smallpox as an aerosol," Zelicoff said in an interview.

"It has been talked about and it has been rumored about but no one has ever actually done it," he added. "It is real, it has happened and it works. We have to live with it."

Zelicoff described the report at a meeting on Saturday of policymakers, bioterrorism experts, emergency response officials and others at the Institute of Medicine in Washington. The experts are helping to put together U.S. policy on whether and when to vaccinate against smallpox.

Smallpox was declared eradicated worldwide as a disease in 1979, but the former Soviet Union, and perhaps other countries, continued to develop the potentially deadly virus as a biological weapon.

Experts are considering whether to vaccinate Americans now that, after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, a biological attack is considered more likely than ever before.

Vaccination in the United States stopped in 1972 and doctors say it is unlikely more than a small fraction of those who were vaccinated have any useful immunity left.

Dr. D.A. Henderson, who led the fight to eradicate smallpox through a global vaccination campaign and who advises the government on bioterrorism issues, said he was not especially worried by the report.

"We do know the Russians were engaged with weaponizing the virus. We do know they were fiddling with the virus," he told the meeting. "I see nothing new."

The outbreak was in Aralsk, a port on the Aral sea in what is now Kazakhstan, Zelicoff said. He says he believes it originated from a field test of a smallpox biological weapon.

FIELD TESTING CITED

"There were a total of three deaths from hemorrhagic disease," he told the meeting. "Anyone who was not vaccinated, that is, the three people, died from the disease," he said.

The others, who had all been vaccinated, contracted smallpox but did not die.

According to the New York Times, which reported on a leaked version of the report in Saturday, it mentions an interview with General Pyotr Burgasov, a former official in the Soviet germ weapons program. He was quoted in November by the Moscow News as saying the outbreak was caused by field testing of 400 grams, or a little less than a pound, of the virus.

The report said at the time, Soviet health officials rushed to contain the outbreak, disinfecting homes, stopping travel to and from the area and vaccinating 50,000 people.

"I've never seen anything quite so disturbing as this," said Zelicoff, who is also a smallpox expert at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.

He said he interviewed one of the survivors, a woman who was on a ship in the Aral Sea at the time of the outbreak. The most likely way she became ill, he said, was through breathing in aerosolized smallpox.

Henderson cast doubt on this but Zelicoff said he has factored in the time smallpox can live in the air, the winds on the Aral Sea, and the fact that no one below deck on the ship became infected.

The United States is working with vaccine makers to produce enough vaccine to cover everyone in the country in case of an outbreak. Henderson said existing stocks of the vaccine could be delivered within 12 hours.

"In the short term I don't think this changes the need for the acquisition of vaccine to cover everyone," Zelicoff said. "All things being equal, look, the vaccine worked pretty well. What it says is that we shouldn't stop here. We almost certainly need to look at antiviral drugs."

Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said tests were underway on an antiviral drug called tenofovir, now used against a herpes virus, which has shown promise against pox viruses in animals.

He said scientists were developing oral versions of the drug that appear to be even more potent than current intravenous forms.