- Senior scientific advisers to the World Health Organisation
(WHO) have recommended the creation of a genetically modified version of
the smallpox virus to counter any threat of a bioterrorist attack.
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- Permitting researchers to engineer the genes of one of
the most dangerous infections known to man would make it easier to develop
new drugs against smallpox, the scientists said. But the man who led the
successful global vaccination campaign to eradicate smallpox from the wild
said he opposed the move on the grounds that the scientific benefits were
not worth the risks to public health.
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- Professor Donald Henderson, of the Centre for Biosecurity
at the University of Pittsburgh, said he feared that tinkering with the
genetic makeup of the variola virus - which causes smallpox - might accidentally
produce a more lethal form of the disease.
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- "What I worry about is that there is rather too
much done in this area and the minute you start fooling around with it
in various ways, I think there is a danger," Professor Henderson said.
"I'd be happier if we were not doing it and the simple reason is I
just don't think it serves a purpose I can support. The less we do with
the smallpox virus and the less we do in the way of manipulation at this
point I think the better off we are."
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- Laboratory stocks of smallpox are stored at only two
locations - one in America and one in Russia - but there are fears that
samples of the virus may have fallen into the hands of terrorists.
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- Scientists advising the WHO believe that creating a GM
form of the virus would accelerate research into developing new antivirals.
The WHO is due to consider the recommendations of its scientific committee
at the world health assembly in May.
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- Four years ago, scientists in Australia genetically modified
a mousepox virus and inadvertently created a highly virulent strain that
could not be stopped by vaccination. But the WHO insisted the latest proposal
to engineer the human smallpox virus was inherently safer.
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- Professor Geoffrey Smith of Imperial College London,
who chairs the WHO committee for variola virus research, said American
scientists simply wanted to insert a jellyfish gene, which produced a glow
under fluorescent light, in order to see the virus better under the microscope.
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- "The reason why the proposal was made and the reason
why the committee was prepared to consider it was that it is clear that
there is a need to develop drugs against the virus," Professor Smith
said. "The quickest way to screen a large database of compounds is
to have an automated way and if you have a virus that expresses the green
fluorescent protein you can do the drug screening in a much more rapid
and automated way."
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- It is understood there are seven recommendations in the
proposal, including permission to allow relatively large fragments of the
virus - up to 20 per cent of its entire genome - to be shipped from the
two secure laboratories to other research institutes in the world. Another
recommendation allows Russian and US laboratories to snip small fragments
of the virus and insert them into other members of the same pox-virus family.
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- Smallpox is one of the biggest killers in the history
of infectious diseases. At least 300 million people died of it in the 20th
century alone. It was eradicated in 1977.
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- ©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/
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