- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An
experiment aimed at stretching out current U.S. supplies of smallpox
vaccine
is going very well, the head of the government agency sponsoring the tests
said on Sunday.
-
- Most of the people who have volunteered to get
watered-down
versions of the smallpox vaccine have had a "take" -- meaning
their arms have blistered up, which in turn suggests they have some
immunity,
Dr. Anthony Fauci told a news conference.
-
- "I can tell you that the study was very successful
-- it had a very high take rate," Fauci told a news conference at
the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science
(AAAS) in Boston.
-
- Fauci heads the National Institute of Allergies and
Infectious
Diseases, which is sponsoring the research.
-
- Smallpox was declared officially eradicated worldwide
in 1980, and the last naturally occurring case was in 1977. Vaccination
stopped in the United States in 1978 and the familiar round scar on the
arm made by the vaccine now effectively dates people over the age of
20.
-
- But even before the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and
Washington, experts had been warning of the potential of a biological
attack
and said smallpox could be a top weapon of choice.
-
- WEAPONS EXPERIMENTATION
-
- It is highly infectious, kills about 30 percent of
patients
and scars most of the rest. Although it does not exist in nature any more,
the United States and Soviet Union kept samples and experts say the Soviets
and other governments experimented with weapons made from smallpox.
-
- The anthrax attacks in October heightened even more the
worries that diseases might be used as weapons against the U.S.
population.
-
- The United States has 15 million doses of smallpox
vaccine
and tests are underway to see if these can be stretched out by diluting
them. Fauci said the government will report on the results soon.
-
- The United States has contracted with two companies to
make more than 200 million more doses "so that we would be able to,
if necessary, vaccinate everyone," Fauci said.
-
- The U.S. is also sponsoring research to formulate a
"third
generation" vaccine that would cause fewer side-effects. The current
vaccines use a live virus that is harmless in healthy people but which
kills one to two in a million who get it -- mostly those with suppressed
immune systems.
-
- AIDS patients would be in danger from the vaccine.
-
- SEEKING ANTHRAX SOURCE
-
- Other experts told the AAAS meeting of efforts to use
genomics, the study of an organism's collection of genes, to try and find
out where the anthrax in the October letter attacks came from.
-
- But Dr. Clare Fraser of The Institute for Genomic
Research,
which is sequencing the anthrax genome, said the effort will not produce
an answer quickly and is unlikely to solve the crime.
-
- "I think it is a little bit premature to say whether
it is possible to trace the organism genomically," she said.
-
- Fraser said some genetic differences had been found
between
the anthrax spores packed into a letter sent to a Florida newspaper office
that killed one man and made another sick and the Ames strain -- a strain
of anthrax used widely in U.S.
-
- "We have some found differences between the
reference
Ames strain and the Florida isolate," Fraser said.
-
- David Franz of the Southern Research Institute and a
former Department of Defense bioterrorism expert, said the search should
focus on people with advanced microbiological skills.
-
- "I believe that whoever produced the formulation
that we saw in the Daschle letter was someone who knew what they were
doing,
who was a craftsman, who didn't just start with a page from the Internet,
a book from the library in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other and
cook this up," he said.
-
- "It would not take a complex lab to do if the
individual
knew exactly what he or she was doing."
-
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