Smallpox virus retention debate (original) (raw)

The smallpox virus retention debate has been going on among scientists and health officials since the smallpox virus was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1980. The debate centers on whether or not the last two known remnants of the Variola virus known to cause smallpox, which are kept in tightly controlled government laboratories in the United States and Russia, should finally and irreversibly be destroyed. Advocates of final destruction maintain that there is no longer any valid rationale for retaining the samples, which pose the hazard of escaping the laboratories, while opponents of destruction maintain that the samples may still be of value to scientific research, especially since variants of the smallpox virus may still exist in the natural world and thus