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Could Smallpox Be Next?
Monday
October 15, 2001
There may be another terrorist weapon that could be worse than anthrax. It’s a virus called Smallpox and it is highly contagious. One person can infect hundreds, and hundreds can infect thousands simply by breathing on them.
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Dr. Peter Katonah, an infectious disease specialist at UCLA, says, “You can take a very, very tiny amount of it and cause a lot of damage.”
Dr. Katonah believes an outbreak would be catastrophic. “Once you're infected there's a chance you'll die because there's no specific therapy."
That means there are no drugs to treat smallpox. You get the disease by inhaling it and within weeks symptoms appear. They start with fever, headache, and backache. Then a disfiguring rash covers the entire body. Some people can fight off the infection, but one-third will die. Dr. Katonah says, “The only prevention for this disease is to get vaccinated."
If you're older than 29, you probably got the smallpox vaccine as a child. That protection lasts only five years. A vaccine can stop an outbreak from spreading, but right now there's not enough. Dr. Katonah says, “We're looking at diluting the vaccine to increase the amount available.”
Dr. Mark Buller, a virologist of at St. Louis University, is also urgently working to produce a new vaccine and drugs to treat it. He says, “The new vaccine won't be available until 2002.”
As far as we know, only the United States and Russia have stockpiles of smallpox. Some experts are afraid terrorists may have stolen the deadly virus. So are we ready for a smallpox attack? Dr. Buller says, “The problem comes with whether you have multiple outbreaks at one time.”
Hopefully with the government on high alert, this will never happen.
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