America is to hang on to its supply of smallpox virus, amid fears that
terrorists may have obtained enough of the deadly virus to launch an attack. The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, will retain its
stock to allow urgent research into new vaccines and treatments. Russia holds
the world’s only other sample at the Vektor Institute in Siberia, having made
tonnes of the virus as part of a secret biological weapons programme 20 years
ago.
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