Smallpox From The Past

An anonymous reader submits "Earlier this year, librarian Susanne Caro was looking through an 1888 book on United States Civil War medicine and discovered a small envelope labeled 'scabs from vaccination of W.B. Yarrington's children' and signed by Dr. W.D. Kelly, the author of the book. After a bit of research, she realized they might be smallpox scabs used in early live vaccination methods and contacted various officials including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC was excited by the find, because it gives them an untreated specimen from over a century ago, and a chance to look at the disease's evolution. Although the FBI had concerns that the smallpox may have been planted in the book, most of the researchers believe the scabs are too old to be dangerous, and they fear they may not even be able to yield live smallpox."

Comments

Interesting

[shawnywany]

Sounds creepily like the beginning of a Robin Cook novel...

Re:Interesting

[fastidious edward]

Don't worry, sounds like no one else read it for ~130 years... probably wasn't a compulsive read.

Re:Interesting

[AndroidCat]

I doubt there are envelopes full of scabs even in the signed copies.

I am glad I am alive today...

[Azadre]

Because I would hate to contract small pox just for working during a strike...

uhh

[nomadic]

Ok, the FBI thinks someone planted smallpox, in an envelope LABELLED with biohazard information, in a 19th century book, in Santa Fe. What the hell is wrong with them? I mean, that's just moronic.

Re:uhh

[Anonymous Coward]

Better safe from psychos than sorry?

Seriously, I'm glad they consider it a possibility, and hopefully prove it wrong.

Re:uhh

[fastidious edward]

It is because most mods, like most readers, browse at +2, therfore missing posts that need to be modded up and acting like sheep on posts that already have been.

Re:uhh

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they were worried the story was
a hoax by someone who wanted to create fear
and panic.

As you might recall, after the US was hit with
a bioweapons attack (resulting in numerous
deaths, and the shut down of the U.S. Senate
offices), it become popular for people to
"copy cat" the weapon. Soon, people were
sending packets of white talc power in the
mail with threatening notes, all in hopes of
causing a panic and shutting down a business
for a few days.

As we've gotten used to this sort of ruse,
and developed technologies to detect anthrax
spores, the people trying to spread panic have
gotten more clever.

Consider, for example, how hard it would be to
create panic by sending a note through the mail
claiming that the envelope contained small
pox. Since small pox is tightly controlled,
and highly infectious, it's unlikely a group
(other than a government) has a sample of the
virus. So the hoax would quickly unravel.

A clever person who wanted to create a plausible
story about how a small pox virus came to be
found in a public space might have to work
harder. For example, they could make up a
story about old medical samples, museum equipment,
etc.

And so in this case, it's entirely reasonable
for the FBI to question the origin of this
envelope. No, I don't think they started
out by saying "This was planted by Al Queda."
Instead, they started with a skeptical
line of questions: who had the book? was it
ever check out before? where was it kept?
who had access to this text? is the person
claiming to make the find a real librarian?
etc.

I think in this case, you, my friend, are the
one who jumped to conclusions about the
conduct of the FBI. Indeed, it would seem
that your post exhibits the sort of haste
and rush-to-judgement that you seek to
condemn.

Re:uhh

[Anonymous Coward]

Three cheers for the USA's foreign policy.

Re:uhh

[mabu]

Actually, they were worried the story was
a hoax by someone who wanted to create fear
and panic.

In addition to "Fair and Balanced", I believe Fox News has "Fear and Panic" copyrighted. Watch yourself or you could get sued.

Re:uhh

[nomadic]

You're missing the point entirely. Their first act was to ask who had the book. They then put the envelope in a PAPER BAG and MAILED it to a laboratory? What kind of idiocy is that? The first thing they should have done, is quarantine the envelope. Then they should have asked who came into contact with it in order to make sure nobody was infected. Asking whether a borrower could have planted it is just kind of dumb. They should use common sense, just like every other damn law enforcement agency out there. I'm sick of these idiotic conclusions the agents immediately draw (think Wen Ho Lee).

fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

they fear they may not even be able to yield live smallpox

is this a bad thing?? I'd feel better knowing that no remnants of the virus were able to survive that long.

scabs

[Graspee_Leemoor]

About the only time you will find scabs in a book and be excited about it. Mostly you'd say "Ok, I'm only going to buy NEW from now on".

graspee

Re:scabs

[svanstrom]

About the only time you will find scabs in a book and be excited about it. Mostly you'd say "Ok, I'm only going to buy NEW from now on".

Anthrax in envelopes you didn't expect is one thing, although not easily avoided you can minimize the risks in such situations; but picture terrorists selling things with anthrax in them on sites such as ebay and amazon.com.

They might not be able to target the people they want, but they could reach 1'000's of people and completely ruin the business of selling used things online.

Suddenly anyone could be a target of a terroristattack...

Re:scabs

[timepilot]

Yeah but they would get some hairy negative feedback.

Re:scabs

[Anonymous Coward]

"Horrible eBayer, gave my whole family smallpox, DO NOT RECOMMEND!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Re:scabs

[bonzomcgrue]

It could be worse...

• You're at Pizza Hut, dining from their all-you-can-eat salad bar, singlehandedly trying to put them out of business with your furious consumption of iceberg lettuce, shredded carrots, and (low fat) ranch dressing. You're almost looking at the bottom of your bowl after your fourth trip, when you notice something in mired in the dressing below. Still chewing, you fish an envelope from the bowl and using the side of your fork you scrape the dressing off the paper. In runny ink, you read "scabs from vaccination of W.B. Yarrington's children"...
  

Forget smallpox

[Anonymous Coward]

It's largepox you should be afraid of.

Watch those libraries!!

[Fruny]

One more reason to have the government tightly control what books you check out.
Libraries are a breeding ground for terrorists, I tell you.

What Could Happen

[hao2lian]

Hey, are these raisins? *munch*

In a freezer?

[InfiniteWisdom]

From the article:
the envelope rests in a freezer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, awaiting a battery of tests.

Yes, after lying in a library book for 115 years I can see why is important that it be frozen now.

It's like a time capsule

[mcc]

What a wonderful idea for a time capsule that would be. Create a time capsule to be opened in hundreds or thousands of years and place in it some of the diseases which may have died off by then and which the generations of the future will not have had the chance to enjoy.

Infectious disease: The gift that keeps on giving.

clever al Qaida

[tuxette]

Within days, two FBI agents visited the Santa Fe library to pick up the scabs. They questioned a surprised Caro for half an hour, asking who had last used the book and whether she felt the borrower may have "planted" the scabs inside

Yep. With all that Arab oil money they are funded with, al Qaida has invented a time machine, gone back to 1888, and planted smallpox in a book they know some woman in the future will pick up and read.

Virus are on Border of living and Dead Matter ...

[leoaugust]

1. virus -- ((virology) ultramicroscopic infectious agent that replicates itself only within cells of living hosts; many are pathogenic; a piece of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) wrapped in a thin coat of protein)

In viruses, which represent the border between living and dead matter, there are simpler aggregates between nucleic acids and proteins. A virus can be said to be genetic material without a cell of its own, and the structure of viruses can provide clues to the more complicated organisation of the hereditary material in higher organisms.

Virus represent the border between living and dead matter. I thought that it meant that when the virus came across a host cell it could inject its DNA and multiply and that is why it is living , and when it didn't it just lay dormant i.e. it was dead matter. Wasn't the whole premise of Jurrasic Park based on this notion ?

But in the article it says ....

Several years ago in Kentucky, she said, a construction crew unearthed a metal coffin containing the mummified corpse of an apparent smallpox victim that researchers traced to the mid-1800s. The CDC checked the tissue for live virus and came up empty.

There's also a slim chance, researchers say, that the scabs could yield live smallpox virus -- believed to reside in only two laboratories in the world -- and provide valuable information on the deadly plague.

If the virus is nothing but the DNA and a protein coating around it, why are the people wanting it to be live ?

Am I missing something ? What am I missing ?

WHO Spoke too Soon?

[Mikkeles]

I guess the World Health Organization's crowing about smallpox eradication was a bit too early!

Re:Virus are on Border of living and Dead Matter .

[Slowping]

If the virus is nothing but the DNA and a protein coating around it, why are the people wanting it to be live ?

Am I missing something ? What am I missing ?


They are probably referring to whether or not the DNA information is sufficiently in-tact. If the DNA is too far destroyed, the virus probably won't be able to reproduce itself even after infecting a live cell.

"Live" virus

[porkchop_d_clown]

In this context, "live" virus is able to infect and reproduce. "Killed" virus has been damaged to the point that it cannot infect a cell. Hence the concern over using "live" virus vaccines - the vaccines use a damaged or weakened virus that the body can easily defeat - but occasionally a few full strength particles get through and trigger the disease instead of vaccinating against it. "Killed" virus vaccines use fragments of destroyed viruses, ensuring you can't get sick from them, but possibly not as effective as the live kind.

Re:Virus are on Border of living and Dead Matter .

[dustman]

If the virus is nothing but the DNA and a protein coating around it, why are the people wanting it to be live ?

Am I missing something ? What am I missing ?

I think they just mean viable, not really "live", since "live" has a weird meaning for a virus. If they couldn't find live virus samples, then either the virus wasn't there, or it was, but is now "dead", in the sense that it can't work anymore.

True, viruses are just dna and protein, or something like that... Collections of complicated chemicals, basically. They can still degrade, given enough time. Heat them up enough, they will "die", by having their molecules scrambled, etc...

But, IANAChemist, nor a biologist, so take my words with a grain of salt.

Misleading statement in article

[mesocyclone]

There's also a slim chance, researchers say, that the scabs could yield live smallpox virus -- believed to reside in only two laboratories in the world

Only the naive believe that live smallpox exists in only two labs in the world. A more accurate statement in the article would have been "only legally allowed in two labs in the world."

There is strong reason to believe that North Korea has the virus. France is also believed to have it. Iraq may have had it up until recently, as it was endemic in the region in the late sixties, and just a few scabs in a refrigerator would have been enough. It used to be common practice for scientists and doctors to keep a bit of smallpox in the fridge when they gathered it from patients. Hence there could be samples, possibly not even labelled or known to the owners, in a number of places in the world.

One reason that the plan to destroy all stocks at the CDC and the official Russian lab was the realization that rogue countries probably had the virus, and hence destroying it would damage future defense attempts.

Furthermore, the USSR and later Russia maintained stockpiles of 20 tons of weaponized smallpox in the eighties (authorized by Gorbachev) and probably to the present, and loaded it into missile warheads. Furthermore, a number of their scientists have since emigrated to other countries. In 1994 a number visited North Korea for unknown reasons. One former Soviet BW officieal entered into a deal with Iraq to sell 5000 liter fermenters.

And then we have accidental discoveries like these scabs. Smallpox can survive in scabs for a long time, although >100 years is stretching it.

Re:Virus are on Border of living and Dead Matter .

[DocDendrite]

But, IANAChemist, nor a biologist, so take my words with a grain of salt

Well, I am a Biologist and your answer is right!

The basic unit of life is the cell. Anything subcellular is not considered "alive" by scientific standards.

-DD

Homeland Security Issues Alert

[moehoward]

Tom Ridge will claim that we now need to ban books in order to be more "secure".

The FBI needs to get a life if they were at all concerned about this. How embarassing. Morons. Everything is "terrorism" until proven otherwise. My god.

Re:Bioweapons will be used in WWIII (2006-)

[mesocyclone]

It's a widely believed fact that bioweapons and extensive use of tactical nuclear weapons will be used in WWIII that is due to begin in 2006-2007.
Russia, China and the Arabs will unite. New York will be devastated by two small nuclear devices and while USA isolates itself to deal with the trauma, China invades Asia and Russia pushes into Western Europe.

Could you pin down the dates a little more, old chap? I need to get my planning in order and know when to go hide.

Thanks!

From strength to strength

[Doc Ruby]

Don't worry, this is the FBI which has made short shrift of Osama bin Laden, singlehandedly captured Saddam Hussein, cornered the Anthrax Mailer, cleverly foiled the 9/11 planebombings on advance intelligence, have kept Chinese industrial spies away from our tech secrets, has won the drug war, busted the thieves at Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Arthur Anderson, and the rest. They found the malicious Bush leaker who blew CIA agent Plames cover in Niger, discredited the 16 State of the Union words about the imaginary African uranium bound for Iraq, preempted Iranian and North Korean nuclear bombs. They nabbed the 2000 election vote riggers, and are already jailing the criminals at the top of the 2004 eVote insecurity debacles. If they think something is scary, we should all bow our heads in fear, and double their budget again. If it were possible to promote the FBI chief, we would; instead, we'll just have to settle for the Patriot Act, which dissolves that archaic Bill of Rights which was just getting in the way.

Re:From strength to strength

[Doc Ruby]

With the Democratic primaries yet to get underway, there's no way to be sure which of the Democrat/Republican candidates will more likely "clean house". It's a pretty safe bet that it won't be Bush, who offers the worst governance here since George III (ironic). I already detailed some obvious, compelling government incompetence in my original post. I leave it to the candidates to pitch their vision of better governance, and the voters to decide which candidate to take up on their offer. As we write these words, you and I are engaging a fraction of the voters, however small. That kind of citizen activity is our privilege and duty. Shirking it is a luxury we cannot afford, exceeding it is not necessary when widely applied. This is the peer-to-peer model of unity that revolutionized government when installed in the late 1700s, and has kept us going for centuries since

If we were to upgrade the US government, I'd keep the entire basic framework, of course. The problems we have now are mainly the result of the last few generations gaming the system, perverting small holes in the execution of the system into giant power abuses. If you're really listening, I'll hit a few highlights of my patches.

Proportional voting. Or "instant runoffs" - instead of choosing only one candidate, and valuing the rest equally as "loser", we sort the candidates by preference. The one whose combined total is highest is the one best representing the voters. Lazy voters can just choose their top 2, 3 or 5. When proportional voting is underway, we can open the ballots to anyone meeting a minimum petition requirement for seriousness, like 5% of the registered voters in the voting district.

Immediately drop the electoral college in favor of total popular vote percentage across the country, as it's an implementation artifact from centuries ago, when travel and communication was much cruder. Likewise the single Election Day, giving a floating day off work to anyone claiming it in an election November. Hell, if that isn't enough, let's study the cost/benefits of requiring best 2 out of 3 elections, across a month or two, with all results kept secret until the third was complete. Just to get a meaningful sample into the statistical model of "the will of the people", that we call an election.

While we're at it, set the income of every elected official at the *median* (50/50% of population) salary in their constituency. With a pension at the upper 10% of that constituency. And no other income allowed, with annual audits. Encourage politicians to do it for more than the money, while guaranteeing them financial rewards, and an incentive to retire. With an additional incentive to long-range plan for the incomes of that constituency, to which their income will be directly tied.

Still talking about auditing politicians, make the Office of Special Prosecutor *permanent*, hired/fired by the Supreme Court, with jurisdiction over the other two bodies. Let's give Congress a permanent Judicial Reform committee with Supreme Court oversight. Enough of this crap where President appoints whichever selfserving Attorney General he wants to run the Justice Department, usurping the Judicial Branch. That con should have died with Nixon's Saturday Night massacre, when a succession of AGs resigned rather than supress Watergate, until a compliant Robert Bork sucked up the sleaze (and was almost installed on the Supreme Court for life by Reagan 10 years later).

Getting really "libertarian", let's require every candidate to submit their "promises" in writing, before the election. Every candidate seeking a possibly budget-proposing office would have to submit their budget *before* the election. Let's give Tax Day and Election Day (or Month) the same deadline. With tax forms & guides published in the same volumes as the candidates' proposals and sample ballots, submitted at the same time by citizens. Class action suits against lying politicians would be much easi

Re:From strength to strength

[Doc Ruby]

Of all the changes I proposed, dropping the Electoral College is the most "radical", as in the dictionary definition "going to the root". The difference between a republic and a democracy, at least according to Plato, is the difference betwen the people setting the laws directly, and the people setting representatives who set the laws for them. Analogous to a value, and a pointer to a value. Or a libertarian society out of Heinlein's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, with exclusively citizen's arrests, and immediate trials by a jury of witnesses and bystanders, versus selected representatives to do the work of government on behalf of the people, who periodically select those representatives.

The Electoral College, though, is more like a "handle", a pointer to a pointer (to a value). The people elect Electors, who elect representatives, who elect laws. This design pattern is great for large populations of interchangeable sets of values, within which one repeatedly selects a specific value. Fast, repeated switching, along with clear semantics for the two layers of indirection are requirements for which handles are appropriate. They're also appropriate for very large populations of values, too large in number to address by the limited precision of a simple pointer. Memory spaces larger in magnitude than the bitwidth of the pointer are addressed this way, eg. >4GB RAM in a 32bit pointer to a character. Both of these applications of handles are workarounds for limitations of the addressing scheme. They work well, but when the limitations don't exist, they're unnecessary overkill, confusing, and prone to error, especially when writing new software that doesn't reflect the double-indirection of the handle.

For the first hundred years or so of the American republic, a handle solved the problem of managing the communication of the large (1-10M+) population. Any timely consensus was "fast" in an age of horses and sail, across half a continent. And breaking the population into manageable tiers of components was absolutely necessary in managing reliable communication using newspapers among the largely illiterate, public speeches among the largely rural, and bean counting boxes among a largely post-feudal population. It was a design decision to overcome problems of implementing a republic on a scale orders of magnitude larger than any experienced by Plato, or anywhere else. It was wise to start the implementation with overkill and scale back, rather than fail early due to an unmanageable complexity. But now it just gets in the way.

Who can defend any of the elections where the electoral vote misrepresented the popular vote, especially the gamed 2000 presidential election? The Electoral College was a flawed design from the beginning, vulnerable to system gaming. For example, a current book called _Negro President_ analyzes Jefferson's 1801 ascension to the the presidency owing to his electoral victories in the South. His electoral votes were swelled by the 3/5 elector per person value of slaves (who couldn't vote); if only voters were counted, Jefferson would have merely been a brilliant writer and revolutionary. Whether that would have been as good for the country, especially in light of the Louisiana Purchase, is another debate. But the will of the people was subverted by Electoral College manipulation, and continues to be. We don't need it, and its dead weight is helping drag down our country - drop it now.

I, For one

[geekoid]

welcome are new FBI overlords.

Seriously, this was probably a routine chit chat thay have when enybody discovers something like this.

I'm sure they new full well it wasn't a real issue. otherwise it would have been VANS of FBI agents.

Captain Obvious strikes again!

[mabu]

the FBI had concerns that the smallpox may have been planted in the book

In a related story, the authorities are now scouring libraries coast to coast to find the book entitled, "Where I Am Hiding" by Osama Bin Laden.

Re: Captain Obvious strikes again!

[Black Parrot]

> In a related story, the authorities are now scouring libraries coast to coast to find the book entitled, "Where I Am Hiding" by Osama Bin Laden.

Easy; he's hiding in Iraq's WMD storage facility.

Re:Captain Obvious strikes again!

[sharkey]

In a related story, the authorities are now scouring libraries coast to coast to find the book entitled, "Where I Am Hiding" by Osama Bin Laden.

A source close to the FBI stated that they would be questioning Waldo, as "soon as we've found him. He's a slippery sucker, tho, so it may take some time."

Kubrick's Doomsday Device

[Latent Heat]

Why is the heck would the Russians want smallpox or any other bioweapon on an ICBM (I heard Ken Alibek on TV suggesting that it was for ICBM's)? I can understand a nuke because besides killing people, a nuke can take out fortified sites and infrastructure and impair the ability to fight back. Also, a modern ICBM has a high speed pointy-end forward reentry vehicle, unlike the blunt RV's of early RV's. The blunt body RV has less of a heat shield requirement, but its rapid deceleration and slow entry hurts accuracy and makes it vulnerable to anti-missile defense. So if you have a high speed RV, how the heck do you even dispense a biologic agent that it does much harm?

Also, a biologic agent takes hours if not days to act, allowing for retaliatory strikes, so a biologic ICBM is clearly a kind of Doomsday Machine -- what is to say that the smallbox doesn't spread back to Russia. And you have such a Doomsday Machines, in the words of Peter Sellers, why don't you advertise it to the whole world? What good is a Doomsday Machine that you keep secret?

Re:Kubrick's Doomsday Device

[mesocyclone]

At many times, the Russians have felt that they could win a nuclear war against the US.

And as far as what good is it? The population after a nuclear attack is especially vulnerable (reduced resistance due to stress or radiation sickness, medical facilities overflowed, lots of movement to spread the disease).

The Russians could simply have a vast supply of vaccine ready to distribute.

As far as how you dispense the agent, you use a different RV.

There is no doubt that the USSR had a vast bioweapons program. Many outsiders have now seen the remnants of it, so we are not just relying on Alibek's views. The British had a defector who kept quiet for years about it who had the same story.

And remember, the USSR was not the most rational or efficient organization. The fact that it *could* make these warheads may have been enough to cause them to do it.

Re:Virus are on Border of living and Dead Matter .

[Yunalesca]

First, I think if they can get any DNA out of it, that would be nice. If they mostly (at least supposedly) want to study the evolution of the virus, I'm sure they can garner some information just by comparing the DNA sequence of whatever they pull out, vs. the "current" stock. Of course it's always best to get the whole genome, but there will almost always be highly conserved (having a very low mutation rate) DNA regions. In organisms with large genomes, you can often compare those against each other to study the amount of divergence.

Second ...

"This could lead to a greater evolutionary understanding of the smallpox vaccine we're using in the U.S.,"

Hm ... I'm slightly confused. If the latest vaccine used was cowpox-based, are they trying to study the similarities between now-cowpox and then-smallpox? I can see them wanting to understand how a virus has evolved, but I don't see what exactly comparing it to cowpox would do. Perhaps they want to study how the two have diverged. Any thoughts?

Probably not smallpox virus anyway

[KFW]

AIAAD (Actually, I am a doctor). In fact, my specialty is Infectious Diseases.

By 1888 vaccination against smallpox using cowpox or vaccinia virus was a common practice, as opposed to "variolization" (inoculation with actual smallpox virus, aka variola virus), since the former was so much safer. This is touched on only briefly in the Washington Post article. So even if there is viable virus in the scab, it may not be smallpox. For reference see the first part of this chapter.

>K

Re:Virus are on Border of living and Dead Matter .

[a-aiyar]

If the virus is nothing but the DNA and a protein coating around it, why are the people wanting it to be live?

Am I missing something? What am I missing?

As a card-carrying virologist let me give you a run down on the information you're missing. If you don't consider the type of nucleic acid (RNA or DNA), there are two types of viruses that infect mammalian cells - enveloped and non-enveloped. Enveloped viruses (such as smallpox) have an outer lipid bilayer (the envelope) that is studded with glycoproteins that need to bind specific molecules on the surface of mammalian cells to permit fusion between the viral envelope and the cell membrane. Fusion allows the virus' nucleic acid to enter the cell. The viral envelope is very fragile, and breaks down rapidly when dried. When the envelope breaks down, it spills the contents of the virus out -- i.e. the nucleic acid, which in the absence of the envelope doesn't have a means to specifically enter a cell. This is one reason why wiping surfaces with 100% ethanol (a dehydrating agent) is quite effective against enveloped viruses like HIV.

Even viruses that are not enveloped have protein coats that directly interact with cell surface molecules that act as receptors to mediate the entry of these viruses into cells. The proteins that make up these coats also denature (lose their proper shape) with time, although this is typically a slower process.

Finally, how stable is the viral nucleic acid? Viral nucleic acids are typically not present as naked RNA or DNA, but in a complex of DNA or RNA with proteins that coat them. These coated nucleic acids are quite stable. Nucleic acid from DNA viruses (like smallpox) is likely to be more stable than nucleic acid from RNA viruses, and I'm guessing that they should be able to do phylogenetic studies on the strain of smallpox present in those scabs after amplifying recovered DNA by PCR.

BTW, after many years of Slashdot lurking, a wee bit of horn tooting. My lab works on how the genome of EBV latches on to human chromosomes. Here's a pretty picture from our work that was on the cover of the Journal of Virology last month.

missing category

[Tablizer]

What is really needed now is a moderation option called "Eeewwwww!"