WHO punts on smallpox

The World Health Organization is remaining mum on the issue of maintaining laboratory stocks of the smallpox virus, which the US government wants to preserve for the next five years.

Written byBob Grant

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Small pox virions / CDC

The World Health Organization is remaining mum on the issue of maintaining laboratory stocks of the smallpox virus, which the US government wants to preserve for the next five years. The WHO originally slated the two remaining stocks, one at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the other at a federal lab in Russia, for disposal in 1993, 13 years after the disease was essentially wiped from the face of the earth in 1980. That deadline was pushed back due to pressure from the US and other developed nations, which claimed the stocks were necessary to continue research on the disease should it reappear. The WHO's policy arm, the World Health Assembly, decided this week to defer a decision on the ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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