BANGALORE: The resolution by the World Health Organization (WHO) to hold on to the two last known remaining stocks of the smallpox virus for "crucial research" raises the spectre of bioterrorism, warns a leading Indian virologist.
"If the destruction is delayed indefinitely, the synthesis and preparation of small pox virus as a bio-weapon, by a non-superpower would increase and it may truly become a poor man's atom bomb," says Kalyan Banerjee, former director of the National Institute of Virology in Pune.
The World Health Assembly-WHO's decision-making body-announced Tuesday that it would defer until 2014 any decision on the destruction of the two remaining stocks of the virus since "crucial research" based on the virus remains to be completed.
After smallpox was officially eradicated in 1980, all countries were asked to surrender their stocks of the virus to the WHO to prevent accidental release. Currently the virus is held at two WHO-sanctioned repositories - the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta and a Russian facility in Koltsovo in Siberia.
The debate over whether or not to destroy these two last samples had been going on since 1980. But the WHO has constantly been postponing the date of destruction under pressure from the United States and Russia that wanted to retain the samples until the needed research was complete to develop new drugs and vaccines to counter a potential bioterror attack.
"In my opinion, the world will gain much more by destroying the last traces of the virus than by keeping it," said Banerjee who himself was former member of a WHO advisory committee on smallpox research and now a committee adviser.
"The arguments tendered in favour of retaining the virus appear to be unconvincing," he told IANS. "To put it bluntly, it is the same logic, by which the superpowers continue the possession of the nuclear weapons; they wish to hold on to the smallpox virus as a super bio-weapon."
"The research is being drawn on and on, but research cannot be made a tool or apology for the indefinite retention of the virus," Banerjee said.
Source: The economic times
