Health Briefs recounts a recent tale of buried valuables,
though not anything you would call "treasure". Workers in a seldom-used storage room at the
National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, came across an old box
and, before moving it to another pile, they looked inside to see what it
contained. There were a number of
old-style vials of a type not used since the 1950s, but what took their breath
away was what they read on the labels:
“variola”. Fortunately, these
were trained researchers and they immediately recognized this as the scientific
name for smallpox. A deadly virus,
smallpox was responsible for vast numbers of deaths over hundreds of years in
all corners of the world. It was thought
to be eradicated from the planet since the mid 1970s.
Health Briefs wonders how many other deadly diseases are stored in neglected warehouses around the world.
The Health Briefs TV show notes that upon their
discovery, these samples of the disease were rushed from the low-security
storage room in which they were found to a secure facility in Atlanta,
Georgia, which maintains
a high level of quarantine procedures.
It is indeed fortunate that no untrained personnel came upon the
container in its forgotten resting place over the last six decades and opened
it without understanding the Pandora's box they would be unleashing on an
unsuspecting world. The question now
is: how many other samples of deadly
diseases are tucked away in the corners of seldom-used storage spaces in this
country or around the world?
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