Smallpox: Threat Resurrected

Health ministers from around the world are gathering this month at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO) for their annual meeting, the World Health Assembly. On the agenda will be a dilemma that has dogged decision-makers for decades - whether and when to destroy the last remaining stocks of the smallpox virus, which are still being held in high-security laboratories in Russia and the United States (US) more than thirty years after the disease was erased from the planet.