Vials of smallpox from the 1950s discovered in unused FDA storage room

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Vials of smallpox from the 1950s discovered in unused FDA storage room

By Agence France-Presse
Tuesday, July 8, 2014 14:57 EDT

Federal investigators are probing how vials of smallpox made their way into a storage room at a Food and Drug Administration lab near the US capital, health authorities said Tuesday.

Smallpox is a highly contagious and sometimes fatal disease that has been eradicated after a worldwide vaccination program. The last US case was in 1949; the last global case was in 1977 in Somalia.

The vials were labeled “variola,” another name for smallpox, and they appear to date from the 1950s, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement.


They were found in an unused portion of a storeroom in an FDA laboratory, located on the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

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