THE days of the smallpox virus are numbered. After 10 years of debate, the World Health Organisation has agreed to destroy the last remaining stocks of the virus held at secure US and Russian laboratories.
Delegates from 190 countries attending the World Health Assembly meeting in Geneva last week voted unanimously to destroy the stocks, according to the WHO, and set the "execution date" for June 30th, 1999. Symbolically, the decision comes 200 years almost to the day after Edward Jenner carried out the first smallpox vaccination.
In the 1960s, smallpox was still killing two million people a year but a 10 year vaccination programme, costing 5300 million, ended the disease (the last natural case was in 1977 in Somalia) making it the first disease in human history to have been deliberately eradicated.
Since then the debate has centred on what to do with the remaining stocks of the virus. While some argued more research was needed, others worried about the health and security risks as well as the costs of storing a deadly virus.
In the end, the latter won. Despite the 1999 deadline, the virus will still be around the WHO is storing 500,000 doses of smallpox vaccine as well as the relatively harmless strain of the virus from which the vaccine is made and, in what is surely the modern form of immortality, the complete genetic sequence of the smallpox virus will also be stored, but in the safe environs of a computer database.
Meanwhile the WHO has a new target it is now working to eradicate polio, which afflicts 6,000 people a year, by the year 2000.