US storage room clear-out uncovers vials of smallpox

US government workers cleaning out an old storage room at a research centre near Washington have made a startling discovery — decades-old vials of smallpox packed away and forgotten in a cardboard box.

The six glass vials of freeze-dried virus were intact and sealed with melted glass, and the virus might have been dead,officials at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said yesterday.

Still, the find was disturbing because, for decades after the lethal disease was declared eradicated in 1980, world health authorities believed the only samples of smallpox left were safely stored in super-secure laboratories in Atlanta and in Russia.