Forgotten vials of smallpox found in storage room

Published July 08, 2014·
Associated Press

Government workers cleaning out an old storage room at a research center near Washington made a startling discovery last week - decades-old vials of smallpox packed away and forgotten in a cardboard box.

The six glass vials of freeze-dried virus were intact and sealed with melted glass, and the virus may well have been dead, because it wasn't kept cold over the years, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

Still, the find was disturbing because for decades after smallpox was declared eradicated in the 1980s, world health authorities believed the only samples left were safely stored in super-secure laboratories in Atlanta and in Russia.

Officials said this is the first time that unaccounted-for smallpox has been discovered.

It was the second recent incident in which a government health agency appeared to have mishandled a highly dangerous germ. Last month, a laboratory safety lapse at the CDC in Atlanta led the agency to give scores of employees antibiotics as a precaution against anthrax.

The smallpox virus samples were found in a building at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, that has been used by the Food and Drug Administration since 1972, according to the CDC.

Officials said the vials may have been stored there since the 1950s - no records were found that said exactly when they were placed there.

No one has been infected, and no smallpox contamination was found in the building.

Smallpox can be deadly even after it is freeze-dried, but the virus usually has to be kept cold to remain alive and dangerous.

These vials were stored for many years at room temperature, said Stephan Monroe, deputy director of the CDC center that handles highly dangerous infectious agents.

"We don't yet know if it's live and infectious. It's possible it could be inactivated because of long length of storage," he said.

The samples were rushed to the CDC in Atlanta and will undergo up to two weeks of testing to establish whether they are dead, Monroe said. Then they will be destroyed.

Smallpox was one of the most lethal diseases in history. For centuries, it killed about one-third of the people it infected, including Queen Mary II of England, and left most survivors with deep scars on their faces from the pus-filled lesions.

The last known case was in Britain in 1978, when a university photographer who worked above a lab handling smallpox died after being accidentally exposed to it from the ventilation system.

Global vaccination campaigns finally brought smallpox under control. After it was declared eradicated, all known remaining samples of live virus were stored at a CDC lab in Atlanta and at a Russian lab in Novosibirsk, Siberia.

The labs have the highest possible security measures. Scientists who work with the virus use fingerprint or retinal scans to get inside, wear full-body suits including gloves and goggles, and shower with strong disinfectant before leaving the labs.

The U.S. smallpox stockpile, which includes samples from Britain, Japan and the Netherlands, is stored in liquid nitrogen.

There has long been debate about whether to destroy the known samples.

Many scientists argue the deadly virus should be definitively wiped off the planet and believe any remaining samples pose a threat. Others argue the samples are needed for research on better treatments and vaccines.

At its recent annual meeting in May, the member countries of the World Health Organization decided once again to delay a decision


http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/07/08/forgotten-vials-smallpox-found-in-storage-room/

Pretty jaw-dropping, isn't it?  

This is just insane!

Ok, so why don't we just vaccinate for small pox again. Problem solved! We wait until it escapes from some nut jobs that get a hold of it? How dumb are we?

Lol. Funny. I agree. I trust in the good Doctor, Chuck, about vaccines but I'm just ascared of needles and injections. I doubt any stashes of SPox sitting this many decades at room temp are alive. I wouldn't pepper them on my eggs though...

Thanks for clarifying that, Chuck. So there are some reasons to be concerned about forgotten, lost or stashed leftovers over here that may well still be alive-never mind the Soviets and their ~300,000 strong, multi-metric ton program! This discovery in Bethesda proves once again that our tightest security measures are not flawless.

The vaccine sounds a bit draconian. I wouldn't take it just as a precaution. There'd have to be a full-blown outbreak. However, one of them thar Milking Girls....

Damn, I just checked my fridge and found some behind a carton of orange juice....

CRS,DrPH,I believe that we should all be vaccinated again against small pox. At least the ones of us that wanted it.-----Back to Cold War that only ended here,the Russians have never stopped building to destroy us.But now that the Cold War is back,we need to be vaccinated. When the Cold war ended ,the Russian had a really nasty Small Pox bug developed. Their plan if we went to full war,was to first use their Nukes,but they knew that these Nukes would not kill all of,so they were going to turn loose this nasty Small Pox to finish most of the rest of us off.-----------------------The strange part---The Russians were suppose to turn over their weapons grade small pox to us to be destroyed. We were paying their scientist,their politicians and their guards to keep them from going to other countries.-----------So we sent a team to the facility(with Russian permission) to get the weapons grade small pox, when our team arrived, the gates to the facility were standing open, there were no guards. The facility was not locked and their were no people there. Our team continued to the area where the small pox was suppose to be in Large containers. There were no Large containers,the buildings were empty. We do not know to this day,where the weapons grade small pox went to.But some one has it some where and it is not us. I suspect it was die hard Russians.probably KGB, that could not stand to see ones of their best weapons destroyed.But that is just what I think.But it is still out there. Johnray1  

And who knows what else is out there that ISIS can get they're hands on!

Syria may still have hidden chemical weapons
[URL= ][/URL]http://www.channel4.com/news/syria-chemical-weapons-may-still-have-assets-opcw-assad


Libya: Muammar Gaddafi's secret stash of chemical weapons found


[URL= ][/URL]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/9027836/Libya-Muammar-Gaddafis-secret-stash-of-chemical-weapons-found.htm

Iranian help suspected in secret Libyan chemical weapons arsenal
[URL= ][/URL]http://www.publicintegrity.org/2011/11/20/7467/iranian-help-suspected-secret-libyan-chemical-weapons-arsenal

That's about as realistic sounding as my rapidly growing bird turds in my back yard coming from that airplane as a bio attack on me.

it may be a little far fetched

but not by much

Governments ADMIT That They Carry Out False Flag Terror

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2010/02/governments-have-admitted-that-they.html

governments have done some EVIL stuff

and that little article is just the stuff they got caught at

There is no doubt about that. But a world-class conspiracy to wipe out 3 out of 4 people over smog? Who gets the one mealion dollars? The Arabs hate us so bad they'll wipe themselves out if they can take us with them but everyone else?

yikes!

Satori wrote: you have got to be kidding me Anthrax probe reveals new incident with bird flu, widespread safety lapses http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/11/us-usa-anthrax-idUSKBN0FG1PO20140711

If it can happen at the CDC how safe is a University Lab? &

OK. That sounds reasonable. Most of us seem to poke a little bit at each other from time to time for fun based on some things we may say. I'm certainly pokeable too. (Definately no pun intended guys...) but I agree a little bit about chemical changes to the earth. I don't much believe we have or can even come anywhere close to changing global temperature up or down on our own in a readable amount. Not even if we set off all the nukes of the world I don't think it would do anything to the average temp. Though I do believe in time we may. But not yet. So go ahead and poke me back.

DR. ROY SPENCER: SCIENCE KNOWS 'ALMOST NOTHING' ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING


by WARNER TODD HUSTON 10 Jul 2014 800 POST A COMMENT

At the Heartland Institute's 9th International Conference on Climate Change in Las Vegas, Nevada, this week, Dr. Roy Spencer wowed participants with his presentation titled "What Do We Really Know About Global Warming?" wherein he noted that claims of global warming have been greatly exaggerated.
In 2012, The Economist called the Heartland Institute "the world's most prominent think tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change," and this conference certainly lived up to that reputation. You can see many of the speeches at the conference website and at Heartland's Youtube channel.
As to Dr. Spencer, buttressed by a series of graphs projected on the screen behind him, the Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville began his July 9 address by warning attendees that the "science" of global warming really isn't much by way of science and that bias is everywhere in the field.

     For the rest of the story-and this guy is a NASA Climatologist:

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/07/10/Dr-Roy-Spencer-Science-Knows-Almost-Nothing-About-Global-Warming

I hear you, John. I was an A-student in school, which included science. I come to my own conclusions based on my general knowledge of many, many subjects, not merely in towing any political line. In fact it is that knowledge that leans me in the direction I lean.

I won't argue the fact that we, humans, are burning through precious resourses and effectively harming our planet in varying degrees that one day, with mathematic certainty, will come back to haunt us if we don't alter our course. But in the here and now, we cannot upset our trend too drastically or life as we've known it will certainly be doomed far sooner. I am for intelligent transformations. Ones that are not tantamount to us killing ourselves in order to save the planet. The planet is amazingly resilient and will be fine with or without us for, I think, a very long time to come. Someday fossil fuels will be a thing of the past. As in there won't be much of any useables left. But we still have time to develope these new technologies and so meanwhile...easy does it.

Nobody is arguing that the Earth hasn't seen dramatic climate change before - the problem is the rate of change we're seeing now. It's cause and effect - you can't change the composition of the atmosphere and not expect to see an effect, especially when our weather systems are driven by energy from the sun. CO2 levels are increasing at a phenomenal rate (up from 280 ppm to 380 ppm in 150 years) and we still have a lot more fossil fuel to burn. Future generations are not going to be thanking us for much if we continue to point fingers at countries like China and India and using them as an excuse to continue putting off meaningful change.
The Heartland Institute are a right wing think tank that will say whatever their donors want them to - they worked with Philip Morris a few years ago to try and debunk links between secondhand smoke and lung cancer, and in recent years they've received funding from Charles Koch, Exxon Mobil, and several large pharmaceutical companies. They're far too compromised to be considered a reliable source of information, and they've been shown to be bankrolling some of the most prominent climate deniers.
The best argument so far this week against man made climate change comes from Brandon Smith, Kentucky State Senator and mining company owner, who pointed out that Mars and Earth share the same temperature, but Mars doesn't have coal mines so therefore climate change doesn't exist. Outstanding job of joining the dots (not...). Unfortunately the temperature on Earth is 57 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 138 degrees above Mars' average of -81 degrees, but it was a nice try

Poke...

CRS, DrPH wrote: ...At the risk of pissing off some of you...

Go ahead and try it - you might like it

Yep - ocean acidification has a huge role in the way this is going to play out. As long as the oceans can continue to absorb CO2, they'll act as a damper on atmospheric levels. Unfortunately while that's happening, it's screwing up the chemistry of the oceans.
And oceanic anoxic events are not something you want to have happen anytime soon. Bad, bad things...

Johnray1 wrote: CRS,DrPH and Jacks dad, I know that during the Vietnam War and the US was sending large ships full of Agent Orange to Vietnam,there was a fear that one of these ships carrying large amounts of a very toxic chemical, would go down in a place in the ocean where the Agent Orange would kill so much algae(I think it was algae) that it would stop absorbing CO2 and also quit producing O2.Johnray1

CRS,DrPH and jacksdad, it is not just the Eskimos that are getting strange cancers that they have never had. I can use my own family as an example. As a rule,most people in my family live to be very old and they are active for almost all of that time .My mother died at the age of 95. My oldest brother is 82 and he is still working everyday(but he has quit chasing women).But,one of my first cousin died of Colon Cancer at the age of 52. Up to that point,there has NEVER been a cancer of any kind in my blood relatives.The Oncologist said that his cancer beat everything that they had ever seen. We have some good therapies for Colon Cancer now and my cousin did not respnde to any of it. They finally blamed it on his exposure to Agent Orange while we were in Vietnam. Along about the same time that he died, I had two Melanomas removed from my left lower leg. I have never been one to lay in the sun and I do not like beaches,so my left lower leg had never had much sun exposure. But these two melanomas were right about were the tops of my socks came to when I was wearing boots in Vietnam and dust settling on them when I would take off or land in my helicopter. Another cousin is dying right now of osteoporosis and he is a man,but all three of us were in Vietnam at the same.----- To explain how that happened,we had another first cousin who was killed in Vietnam and when he was killed, I quit college and they quit their jobs and we all joined the Army and volunteered for Vietnam.  But I agree a lot of strange things are happening.Johnray1

jacksdad,that is correct.Johnray1

Johnray1 wrote: CRS,DrPH and jacksdad, it is not just the Eskimos that are getting strange cancers that they have never had. I can use my own family as an example. As a rule,most people in my family live to be very old and they are active for almost all of that time .My mother died at the age of 95. My oldest brother is 82 and he is still working everyday(but he has quit chasing women).But,one of my first cousin died of Colon Cancer at the age of 52. Up to that point,there has NEVER been a cancer of any kind in my blood relatives.The Oncologist said that his cancer beat everything that they had ever seen. We have some good therapies for Colon Cancer now and my cousin did not respnde to any of it. They finally blamed it on his exposure to Agent Orange while we were in Vietnam. Along about the same time that he died, I had two Melanomas removed from my left lower leg. I have never been one to lay in the sun and I do not like beaches,so my left lower leg had never had much sun exposure. But these two melanomas were right about were the tops of my socks came to when I was wearing boots in Vietnam and dust settling on them when I would take off or land in my helicopter. Another cousin is dying right now of osteoporosis and he is a man,but all three of us were in Vietnam at the same.----- To explain how that happened,we had another first cousin who was killed in Vietnam and when he was killed, I quit college and they quit their jobs and we all joined the Army and volunteered for Vietnam.  But I agree a lot of strange things are happening.Johnray1