A government scientist cleaning
out an old storage room at a research center near Washington made a
startling discovery last week — decades-old vials of smallpox packed
away and forgotten in a cardboard box.
The six glass
vials of freeze-dried virus were intact and sealed with melted glass,
and the virus might have been dead, officials at the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention said Tuesday.
Still,
the find was disturbing because for decades after smallpox was declared
eradicated in the 1980s, world health authorities believed the only
samples left were safely stored in super-secure laboratories in Atlanta
and in Russia.
Officials said this is the first time in the U.S. that unaccounted-for smallpox has been discovered.
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