Six vials of the potentially fatal smallpox virus were discovered in a storage room at a Maryland-based government laboratory, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.
Employees at the FDA-owned National Institutes of Health laboratory in Bethesda, which is unequipped to handle the infectious virus, were inside a cold storage room preparing for the lab's move to another facility when the vials were found tucked away with cotton inside cardboard boxes, according to ABC News.
The freeze-dried vials were labeled variola, the virus which causes smallpox, a sometimes deadly disease that causes raised bumps to appear on an infected person's skin, according to the CDC.
Scientists also found 10 other vials, the labels of which could not be read clearly.
After being eliminated from the world in 1977, smallpox now exists only in two laboratories, one in Georgia state and the other in Russia, as part of an international agreement. The fact that the virus was found in Maryland means the agreement was somehow breeched.
The discovery also comes less than a month after dozens of government scientists were potentially exposed to anthrax at a CDC lab in Georgia.
Officials do not know how long the smallpox vials were in the storage room that was kept at 5 degrees Celsius. The boxes they were found in are believed to date back to the 1950s, Tom Skinner, spokesman for the CDC, told the station.
"At the end of the day, we don't know why [the vials] showed up," Skinner said.
Freeze-drying the smallpox virus, of which there is no official cure, would have prolonged its lifespan, according to the CDC. But Skinner said the vials do not pose a health threat to the public.
The last known case of smallpox in the U.S. occurred in 1949, according to the CDC. Before that it killed 30 percent of those who became infected, causing outbreaks all over the world for thousands of years. The only way to prevent infection is through vaccination.
Scientists are to test the discovered vials to see if the virus is still volatile. After testing they are to be destroyed, the CDC told ABC News.
