Why Iraq Probably Has Smallpox
Thu February 20th, 2003 15:24 MSTAs war with Iraq approaches, there are reports circulating about whether Iraq has weaponized smallpox.
Today there exists no solid evidence for that proposition. However, the indirect evidence is very alarming…
In 1995, with the defection of Saddam’s son in law, the world learned that Iraq had successfully been hiding a massive bioweapons program from the inspectors. Hints were found that smallpox was one of the weapons: an empty freezer was found marked “smallpox;” Iraqi’s claimed to have been experimenting with camelpox - which makes no sense except as a proxy for smallpox.
Smallpox samples were commonly kept in countries throughout the world until WHO asked for them to be destroyed in 1979. Smallpox was a very common disease and samples were treated with little care or no special precautions. After all, the medical and lab folks were either vaccinated or survivors. Individual hospitals and physicians commonly kept still-infectious smallpox scabs in ordinary refrigerators. Smallpox existed in Iraq into the 1970s, by which time Saddam Hussein was a powerful figure in the Iraqi Government. It would be unlikely for Iraq not to have kept samples from that outbreak, or reference samples that were commonly traded among smallpox scientists around the world.
Did the Ba’athist regime then in power allow its scientists to follow the WHO’s request and destroy their smallpox? There was never any verification in this case or others that the samples were destroyed. Furthermore, the Ba’athists were allies of the USSR, which had engaged in a conspiracy to make smallpox much more deadly.
Did the Iraqis subsequently acquire smallpox from Russia or other countries? The Soviet Union had a vast organization (Biopreparat) which produced many tons of weaponized smallpox towards the end of the cold war. Following the fall of the USSR, security at the smallpox installations deteriorated alarmingly, and as many as 60,000 trained bioweapons scientists and technicians became unemployed. It is entirely possible that one of these individuals brought out the highly weaponized “India” strain or one of the many other strains of smallpox, and sold it to Iraq.
We can only hope that in fact Iraq has no smallpox, because if they do the result could be catastrophic.
For further reading, I recommend:
“Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox” by Jonathan B. Tucker, and
“The Demon in the Freezer” by Richard Preston.
The New England Journal of Medicine has an article about smallpox by a doctor who worked in an epidemic. I had a link, unfortunately as the article got published, it became register only. I should have “borrowed” a copy.
He had a less than doomsday view of the situation.
Other smallpox info at my site
There has been lots of speculation by veterans of the smallpox eradication effort (including D.A. Henderson who led the effort and is now a consultant to HHS on the subject) and other experts. Issues raised include:
How many people will be infected by each infected person (ranges from less than 1 to over 20 based on historical evidence).
How well can it be contained. Ring vaccination was used to stop *most* outbreaks in the past (except for the last New York City outbreak, where massive vaccination was done). However, since the last outbreak the amount, distance and speed of travel has expanded dramatically, making ring vaccination’s effectiveness questionable. Also notice that the “catastrophic” link in my article refers to vaccination resistant smallpox, which is outside the experience of any physician.
The current population has the lowest resistance level in thousands of years. This is comparable to the level in isolated tribes when they were first exposed to smallpox. Those tribes suffered up to 100% case fatality rates.
Virulence of the specific agent. There are many strains of smallpox, including two different species (variola major and variola minor). In addition, genetic engineering (shockingly easy to do) can create agents outside of our experience. In addition to the ILK-4 mouspox experiments (which so alarmed experts that it has greatly increased the push to censor some biotechnology research), the Soviets created (and published in the open literature) a smallpox strain that included the gene for the Ebola toxin.
How is smallpox introduced into the population? At how many places? Nobody in modern times has experience with intentionally introduced smallpox epidemics.
One cannot count on the terrorists to conform to the least damaging scenario!
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