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"This must be the scariest lost and found ever.\nOfficials are investigating how a handful of decades-old vials of smallpox made their way to an unused portion of a storage room at an FDA laboratory in Bethesda, Maryland.\nSee also: Bill Gates: Satellites and GPS Are Fighting Polio\nThe vials, which the CDC says appear to date from the 1950s, were immediately secured in a containment facility in Bethesda before they were sent to the CDC\u2019s high-containment facility in Atlanta. The vials are now being tested to determine if the virus is still \u201Cviable\u201D \u2014 meaning if it has the ability to grow in tissue culture.\nThe six glass vials of freeze-dried virus were intact and sealed with melted glass, and the virus may well have been dead, because it wasn't kept cold over the years, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.\n\nThe smallpox virus.Image: CDC/Associated Press\"We don't yet know if it's live and infectious. It's possible it could be inactivated because of long length of storage,\" said Stephan Monroe, deputy director of the CDC center that handles highly dangerous infectious agents.\nA government scientist found the vials while cleaning out the storage room at the lab, which is on the Bethesda campus of the National Institutes of Health.\nThe CDC's Atlanta facility is one of two World Health Organization-designated repositories for smallpox. The other is the State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology (VECTOR) in Novosibirsk, Russia.\nThe virus, which killed 300 million to 500 million people during the 20th century, was declared eradicated in 1979. A medical photographer, Janet Parker, was the last person to die of the disease in 1978.\n\nA man who contracted small pox is shown with a formation of scar-producing pustules on his body in 1941.\u201CThere is no evidence that any of the vials labeled variola has been breached, and onsite biosafety personnel have not identified any infectious exposure risk to lab workers or the public,\u201D the CDC says in a statement.\n\u201CCDC has notified WHO about the discovery, and WHO has been invited to participate in the investigation. If viable smallpox is present, WHO will be invited to witness the destruction of these smallpox materials, as has been the precedent for other cases where smallpox samples have been found outside of the two official repositories,\u201D it said.\nOfficials said this is the first time that unaccounted-for smallpox has been discovered.\nIt 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.\nThe Associated Press contributed to this report."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2014/07/08/smallpox-vials-found/>