Smallpox Threat Scares Sandia Expert

Sept. 27, 2002
By Sue Vorenberg

Forget anthrax: It's smallpox that scares Alan Zelicoff.

It takes a lot to give Zelicoff the shivers: He's a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, a medical doctor and physicist who works in the lab's center for national security and arms control.

His specialty is nonproliferation work against biological weapons of mass destruction.

What he's heard in the past five months about smallpox testing that occurred 30 years ago in the former Soviet Union, he says, "changes the entire face of the bioterrorism threat."

Speaking to a gathering of emergency personnel and terrorism specialists in Albuquerque on Thursday, Zelicoff said he believes the Soviets engineered strains of smallpox that are airborne, resistant to vaccines and spread very rapidly.

"Those strains weren't destroyed," he said. "We don't have any idea where they are. The prime researcher working on them retired and spent the rest of his life in a country other than Russia.

"I'll leave it to your fertile imagination to figure out where that is."

Zelicoff wouldn't say to which country the scientist moved.

Until little more than 50 years ago, smallpox was a worldwide scourge, with episodic breakouts killing people by the millions. Nearly a third of those infected died from the illness, which spreads through the air.

A vaccination program has made the disease so rare that most doctors are not even trained to recognize it.

Zelicoff said the Soviets developed and tested biological weapons on an island in the Aral Sea from the 1960s through the 1980s, even though it had signed a treaty banning biological weapons development.

"We learned only recently from an ex-Soviet that smallpox was actually their biological weapon of choice," he said.

A minor outbreak of smallpox of a type apparently engineered as a biological weapon was recorded in 1971, he said. In all, 10 people were infected, three of whom died. The other seven became ill but survived - and those seven had received vaccine as children.

"When you talk about vaccines and the ability to transmit smallpox, there's about a 2 percent chance that you'll still get the disease," Zelicoff said. "In this case, there was a 12 percent chance. That means the organism is easily spread and is resistant to vaccines. Vaccines are our only way to fight this disease."

Stopping the use of biological weapons has been a preoccupation of international bodies for decades. Having been a member of the advisory group that worked on the Biological Weapons Convention, Zelicoff is painfully aware of the shortcomings inherent in that approach to weapons control.

"Some people think the political approach is important. I think it's an abject failure," he said. Countries can have many legitimate reasons for having stockpiles of toxic agents, like botulism toxin, which has many medical uses but can also be a formidable weapon.

"So it's a treaty that bans evil intent; it doesn't ban ownership," Zelicoff said. "Verification of that is near impossible. How can you verify intent?"

The ability to act quickly when attacked is another approach, but it also has serious shortcomings, he said.

"We're facing a horrible problem," he said. "Detecting proliferation of a disease is very hard with sensors. Treaties are inadequate. Disease monitoring may be the only key to making the terrorist's job harder."

To that end, the most important approach may be a tool created by Sandia, he said. The Rapid Syndrome Validation Project, which has been running in New Mexico for the past year as part of a Sandia test of the technology, could help doctors find an outbreak quickly.

The project is an online software system that lets doctors confidentially enter information about symptoms seen in patients. The software compiles the information and overlays it on a map of the state.

With it, doctors, the military or the Centers for Disease Control can compare common symptoms in an area and see whether it looks like terrorists have deployed a biological weapon, such as smallpox, in a specific area.

"If we can detect smallpox or anthrax when the first few people get sick, we can save 90 percent of them," Zelicoff said.

Ultimately, doctors, government officials and the public need to pay close attention and report any suspicious symptoms or outbreaks quickly to prevent larger outbreaks, especially since information about Soviet work on the disease has come to light, Zelicoff said.

"I really thought I had my arms around Smallpox because I thought I understood the most vile applications of the disease," he said. "I was wrong."

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