HHS official says threat of smallpox attack low

Although a handful of states are suspected by U.S. authorities of illicitly possessing stores of smallpox virus, the probability of a smallpox attack against the United States is low, a senior U.S. official said Wednesday.

"I think we're looking at it at this point as a low risk of it being used as a weapon," D.A. Henderson, the Health and Human Services Department's top science adviser for public health preparedness, said.

He also said the information the United States has on suspected smallpox stores in other countries is "simply not terribly good."

That view is relevant to the Bush administration's pending decision on whether to vaccinate the entire U.S. population, about 290 million people, which Henderson said could cause an estimated 300 to 400 deaths and possibly 1,400 serious illnesses from the side effects of the vaccine.

An alternative under consideration would be to vaccinate up to 500,000 medical and emergency response personnel.

Henderson's view provides a counterpoint to a CIA assessment, reported by The Washington Post Tuesday, which concluded that Russia, France, North Korea and Iraq maintain undisclosed stocks of the virus. The story also said al Qaeda terrorists had sought the virus but had not successfully acquired it.

Concerns about the perceived threat, the Post said, have strengthened the position of some in the administration pushing for vaccinating the U.S. population. There are others, however, who support the more limited vaccination strategy, leaving President Bush to make the decision, the story said.

Differing Degrees of Certainty

Following a successful campaign to eradicate smallpox amid a global outbreak in the 1960s and 1970s, the World Health Organization requested that all stores of the virus around the world be destroyed or turned over to the organization for storage at only two sites, one each in Russia and the United States. By late 1983, all but those two countries had reported no longer possessing the virus.

Henderson has previously said he believes Iran and Iraq may have obtained samples when that outbreak passed through their respective countries.

In a briefing sponsored by the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute Tuesday, Henderson described as "probable" the possibility Russia was working on smallpox at one undeclared site.

"The Ministry of Defense production center, the principle center, at Sergiyev Posad, is still intact, it is a secret facility. What all may be going on in there is very difficult to find out and frankly very little is known about that, except it is still wholly intact," he said.

He listed as "possible" illicit stores at a number of other sites.

"We've had rumors from Russia of several other sites where smallpox virus might be present," he said.

He said there were "varying degrees of certainty or uncertainty" regarding suspected stocks in North Korea, Iraq and Iran.

"The information we have as to where smallpox might be present, is simply not terribly good, and it is very hard to ascertain this," he said.

The CIA report also rated the levels of confidence in the intelligence on suspected stocks from high with respect to Russia, to not as high for Iraq and France, to medium for North Korea, according to the Post.

A French Foreign Ministry spokesman Wednesday said the country does not have any smallpox stocks.

With respect to France, Henderson said, "I can't verify or endorse what was said in The Washington Post."

He suggested French stocks of smallpox vaccine might have served as a source of confusion, just as Swiss vaccine stocks recently were misinterpreted as the smallpox virus.

"Certainly, this allegation with regard to France. I had no idea where that came from," he said.

Henderson said the United Kingdom and the United States once also had trouble keeping track of their own stocks. After making their declarations to the WHO, he said, "one of our military laboratories, one of our state health department laboratories, several places in Britain, discovered after they'd thought they'd destroyed it that they hadn't destroyed it."

"So they went ahead and autoclaved it and told us afterwards, 'Oops, we didn't realize that we had it,'" he said.