End Near for Last Stocks of Smallpox
A key U.N. panel has recommended destroying the world’s last laboratory stocks of smallpox--a virus declared eradicated in the wild in 1980.
For years, health experts who have worried that the virus could escape have urged eliminating the stocks, which exist only in the United States and Russia. But fears that this might undermine research delayed the decision.
Researchers now say they no longer need the stocks, the World Health Organization announced Thursday. Scientists have produced harmless clones of DNA fragments of the virus and are satisfied that they have the full genetic blueprint for further tests, WHO officials said.
WHO’s governing board agreed to set June 30, 1999, as the destruction date, pending approval by the 190-nation World Health Assembly.
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