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MOSCOW, Nov 5: Former Soviet germ warfare scientists, warning that rogue powers could lure underpaid Russian researchers, called on Monday for wide reintroduction of worldwide vaccination against the now extinct smallpox virus.
“It is a very dangerous weapon in the hands of terrorists and...you don’t need some clever way of delivering it,” said Lev Sandakhchiyev, director of Russia’s Vektor Institute, which holds one of the world’s two official samples of smallpox.
“All you need is a sick fanatic to get to a populated place,” he told a news conference in Moscow. “The world health system is completely unprepared for this.”
Officials declared smallpox eradicated worldwide in 1981 and have since stopped inoculating people against an illness that had killed countless millions throughout human history.
But authorities in the United States and elsewhere now fear the disease might reappear if individuals like the mystery attackers mailing anthrax to Americans were to get their hands on smallpox. Four people have died so far in the United States.
Sandakhchiyev said scientists at Vektor earn just about $100 a month and so some could — in theory — be tempted financially by outsiders looking to acquire germ warfare expertise.
“Everything is possible in today’s world,” he told Reuters in a later interview.
“If the question is ‘Do Russian scientists work in Iran or Iraq?’ my answer is no. Do Iraqis work at Vektor? The answer is no,” he said of two states Washington says sponsor terrorism.
“But only the devil knows with whom they meet. Our scientists sit at international conferences as part of large government delegations with a large team from Vektor.”
But he added that the institute’s collection of germ warfare agents was protected: “We do have a security system against terrorism and attacks on the collection and our site and we have a controlled entry. People don’t just show up there by chance.”
WIDE VACCINATION NEEDED: Anatoly Vorobyov, a former Soviet general and a leader of Moscow’s secret bioweapons programme in the 1980s, said smallpox posed the greatest health risk among biological weapons because it is highly contagious once one person is infected.
“In principle, the whole population needs to be vaccinated, not only in the United States but in Russia and everywhere in the world,” he said.
The United States has started vaccinating a small number of medical workers against smallpox amid growing fears of a possible re-emergence of the disease. The virus kills at least 30 percent of unvaccinated victims.
The warnings from the veteran Russian scientists are especially chilling given their extensive experience.
In a recent book Soviet germ warfare research, one of Moscow’s former top bioweapons scientists Ken Alibek, says the Vektor institute tested a smallpox weapon in 1990.
Since 1994, Sadakhchiyev’s laboratory in Siberia has held one of the world’s two sanctioned smallpox samples. Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control in the United States has the other.
Western intelligence services suspect some nations including Iraq and North Korea may also have stocks of the smallpox virus, a highly infectious disease that brings a rash and high fever.—Reuters
