Nothing like digging up a few old diseases to "research" the some more before "ooops" something gets outa control. Now THAT's what I call population control !! Heck, ya don't even need a war !

Oh, yeah, this is smart....and we can't even supply enough FLU VACCINES !!!!!! duh......

They should have DESTROYED all that's left of this virus a long time ago. Now they want to genetically modify it so that NONE of us will have ANY immunity to it when (and I mean when) some of it escapes the labs. Talk about the ultimate weapon!! We are screwed.

Don't any of these people love their children?

NPR also covered the story. Here is a link to listen:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4167701

Smallpox was eradicated through the efforts of the WHO and now, this same organization is promoting the genetic manipulation of a virus that has killed more people than all the wars ever waged on this planet.
We could destroy the last two remaining sources of the virus (one in the US and the other in Russia) and be done with it. Since no one in the US has immunity to this virus (the last vaccine administered was in 1980 and it lasts only 10 years), we are exceedingly vulnerable. Only a species hell-bent on self-extermination would want to go ahead and make a more lethal strain.

It's scary that it's WHO advocating this. I wouldn't have been at all surprised if it had been Boy George's crew of screwballs, with WHO vainly trying to stop it. It isn't our species that's necessarily suicidal, but our "president" certainly is. And this is probably one of his more benign policies. There would probably be a few humans survive a new smallpox epidemic and pass on resistence to it, and even if not it would only lead to the extinction of Homo sapiens. The policies being pursued in regards to global warming and nuclear proliferation are on track to push the world back down the evoltionary ladder a few tens of millions of years.

Impressive, the article didn't even mention Bush, but you people take this as an opportunity to bush-bash. Why am I not surprised?

duh, he said "I wouldn't be surprised if...." . Frankly bushwon, I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Bush doesn't make it through the next four years. Your problem is, you aren't reading the articles nor are you looking into the subject matter at hand. It's your arse as well that is on the line in case the frozen smallpox viri is thawed out for further manipulations and ooops, something terribly unregrettable goes wrong. We breath the same air duh.

This does sounds familiar. And I smell a fish, no, not the theo-fish. Bush orders smallpox vaccine for military, himself . "We know, however, that the smallpox virus still exists in laboratories, and we believe that regimes hostile to the United States may possess this dangerous virus." ....more . Just google "WHO" + "smallpox" + "Bush" for even more.

What do you say ? 2+2=5 ?

A History Timeline of Population Control by Robert Howard.