One of the longest and most contentious policy debates in the field of international health has swirled around the fate of the last known stocks of variola virus, the causative agent of smallpox, which are held in 2 World Health Organization (WHO)-authorized repositories in the United States and Russia. After a global campaign under WHO auspices eradicated smallpox in the late 1970s, it was expected that the remaining laboratory samples of variola virus would be destroyed. In the mid-1990s, however, the U.S. government, concerned that a few countries may have retained undeclared caches of the virus for biological warfare purposes, sought to delay destruction of the WHO-authorized stocks in order to develop improved medical countermeasures.
展开▼
