ATLANTA — A government scientist cleaning out an old storage room at a research center near Washington made a startling discovery last week — 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 be dead, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.
Still, the find was disturbing because for decades after smallpox was declared eradicated in the 1980s, world health authorities believed the only samples left were safely stored in super-secure laboratories in Atlanta and in Russia.
Officials said this is the first time in the US that unaccounted-for smallpox has been discovered.
It was the second recent incident in which a government health agency appeared to have mishandled a highly dangerous germ. Last month, a laboratory safety lapse at the CDC in Atlanta led the agency to give scores of employees antibiotics as a precaution against anthrax.
The smallpox virus samples were found in a building at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., that has been used by the Food and Drug Administration since 1972, according to the CDC.
The scientist was cleaning out a cold room between two laboratories on July 1 when he made the discovery, FDA officials said.
Officials said labeling indicated the smallpox had been put in the vials in the 1950s. But they said it’s not clear how long the vials had been in the building, which did not open until the 1960s.
No one has been infected, and no smallpox contamination was found in the building.
Smallpox can be deadly even after it is freeze-dried, but the virus usually has to be kept cold to remain alive and dangerous.
In an interview Tuesday, a CDC official said he believed the vials were stored for many years at room temperature, which would suggest the samples are dead. But FDA officials said later in the day that the smallpox was in cold storage for decades.
Both FDA and CDC officials said more lab analysis will have to be done to say if the germ is dangerous.
“We don’t yet know if it’s live and infectious,” said Stephan Monroe, deputy director of the CDC center that handles highly dangerous infectious agents.
The samples were rushed to the CDC in Atlanta for testing, after which they will be destroyed.At its recent annual meeting in May, the member countries of the WHO decided once again to delay a decision.