Another eerily similar story from 2014 of them "finding smallpox in a freezer. "

[link to www.washingtonpost.com (secure)]


A government scientist cleaning out a storage room last week at a lab on the National Institutes of Health’s Bethesda campus found decades-old vials of smallpox, the second incident involving the mishandling of a highly dangerous pathogen by a federal health agency in a month.

The vials, which appear to date from the 1950s, were flown Monday by government plane to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, officials said Tuesday. Initial testing confirmed the presence of smallpox-virus DNA. Further testing, which could take up to two weeks, will determine whether the material is live. The samples will be destroyed after the testing is completed.

An FDA scientist on July 1 found several cardboard boxes containing dozens of glass vials, each several inches long and sealed with melted glass, according to CDC spokesman Tom Skinner. The boxes were in a storage room kept at about 40 degrees. Several vials were labeled as flu virus, mumps or typhus, he said. Sixteen vials were labeled “variola,” or smallpox, or were suspected of containing smallpox virus. Those vials were in a box with cotton padding. All the vials were immediately secured in a containment laboratory on the NIH campus. The 16 suspect vials were flown to Atlanta. Testing confirmed the presence of smallpox virus DNA in six.