4 ms·
Well this is a moral dilemma: The only officially sanctioned stores of the smallpox virus are held at heavily secured facilities at the CDC in Atlanta and at a
by rer 10y ago
Well this is a moral dilemma:
The only officially sanctioned stores of the smallpox virus are held at heavily secured facilities at the CDC in Atlanta and at a Russian facility in Siberia. Some researchers contend that the samples should be preserved for use in the development of future vaccines or treatments.
- mynameishere 10y agoWell, there are probably more than a few samples in people who died and froze. Maybe there's some smallpox up on Mt Everest for instance.
- akiselev 10y agoHow so? We know that communicable diseases mutate all the time, even when they don't have a single human host, so destroying any samples that could provide a baseline for any future pathogen is nothing short of morally reprehensible. Variola major is one of the deadliest diseases in human history, killing 20+% of those infected, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions in the 20th century alone. If these samples were destroyed and a mutated smallpox reappears globally, it would be an unmitigated public health disaster and we'd be crippled without being able to experimentally compare the new version to the old. Given the stakes and nature's contempt for geopolitics, it's an unavoidable tradeoff.