Indian Smallpox as a Bioweapon

IN a stunning revelation, American bioweapon experts have uncovered that the former Soviet Union not only weaponised an Indian strain of sma...

IN a stunning revelation, American bioweapon experts have uncovered that the former Soviet Union not only weaponised an Indian strain of smallpox but also tested it on a hapless civilian population in the town of Aralsk now in Kazakhstan on the northern shore of the Aral Sea.

The alleged secret bioweapons experiment, using what is called the India-1967 strain of the highly infectious smallpox virus, was carried out way back in 1971. Ten people were reportedly infected while three died.

Smallpox was eradicated from the world in 1979. But two laboratories 8212; one in Russia and the other in America 8212; are still custodians of the last surviving stocks of the dreaded virus, which in the sixties used to kill up to two million people every year.

According to official records, India has no stocks of the smallpox virus. Former Health Minister C.P. Thakur has asserted repeatedly that India had willingly destroyed all its smallpox vials as soon as the disease was eradicated in 1975.

Talking to the prestigious American magazine Science, Alan Zelicoff, a physician and smallpox expert at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, US, said the 1971 Kazakh outbreak shows that an aerosol attack with smallpox could kill people.

According to the recent revelation, the news of this outbreak didn8217;t reach the West until a classified official account, written in the 1970s, was sent to America by a local Kazakh scientist. The official Soviet report claimed the outbreak had a natural origin. But after scrutinising the document and interviewing two of the surviving victims, the Americans reached a different conclusion.

At a meeting of the Institute of Medicine, Washington DC, Zelicoff said that he had never seen anything quite so disturbing and worried that existing smallpox vaccines may not offer adequate protection against the strain. He added that the strain was unusually infectious, because three of the 25 people who were vaccinated against smallpox and were in close proximity with a vaccinated patient got infected. This is an unusually high percentage of infection.

Story continues below this ad

In an interview to Science, Kenneth Alibek, a former top manager at the Soviet bioweapons programme who defected to the US in 1992, is reported to have corroborated most of the claims made by the American experts from Sandia Labs. But Alibek does not believe that the test involved a hitherto unknown strain but was India-1967 also known as India-1, a strain that the Soviets have long been suspected of using in their bioweapons programme and whose DNA was also sequenced a decade back by the Russians.