Smallpox will live to see another year.
Scientists in Atlanta and Moscow were scheduled to simultaneously destroy the world's last remaining smallpox virus on New Year's Eve. But the plan caused such a furor that history's deadliest disease has won a reprieve."We don't know just what the next step will be," said Chuck Fallis, spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "They'll be meeting at some point after the first of the year to discuss it further."
Smallpox in 1977 became the only disease ever eradicated. But scientists preserved some of the live virus to study, frozen in 600 test tubes in heavily guarded laboratories at the CDC in Atlanta and at Russia's Institute for Viral Preparations.
In 1990, the World Health Organization asked the agencies to genetically map one strain of the virus and then destroy it all on Dec. 31, 1993.
The agencies agreed and have mapped two strains and are working on a third. But, because those maps didn't yield enough information and because of a scientific outcry, WHO and the CDC agreed to defer smallpox's execution date.
Dozens of researchers opposed deliberately destroying an entire species.
"Destroying all these vials now will compromise any possibilities of finding out more information," says Dr. Bernard Moss of the National Institutes of Health.
Smallpox is still a mystery - scientists don't even know how it kills. It claimed hundreds of millions of victims since its first recorded attack in ancient Egypt. One in four victims died, suffering convulsions, internal bleeding and painful lesions.
A vaccine was discovered in the 1790s and smallpox took 200 years of immunizations to eradicate.
Next month, a committee of WHO will meet to review just how much researchers have learned from genetically mapping smallpox and whether they expect more mapping will reveal any more.
WHO says keeping the lethal virus around poses the risk of an accidental release or use by terrorists. The CDC dislikes using valuable space and money to guard smallpox in its top-security lab.
Other scientists argue that it's worth the risk to see if smallpox holds clues to eradicating other diseases, or if it might help them identify the way mysterious emerging diseases work.
But the CDC's Dr. Brian Mahy says scientists can continue studying smallpox because his lab has grown the virus, separated its genes, rendered them impotent and then cloned those now harmless genes.