Virions from a smallpox vaccine

What’s the News: Global health officials are expected to decide whether to destroy the world’s last caches of smallpox at the 64th World Health Assembly this week. The disease was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1979, but two small stores of the virus remain: one at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and one in a Russian government lab.

Now, public health officials are divided on how to ensure that the disease stays eradicated. Some say our best bet is to keep the remaining samples of the virus safe and continue to study them, then destroy them at a later date; others say the safest course is to destroy them now, once and for all.

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Almost 3 million AIDS patients in developing nations are now receiving treatment from the life-extending antiviral drugs, according to a new report. It sounds like good news, until you realize that the World Health Organization (WHO) had hoped to reach that milestone in 2005.

AIDS advocates say the international community was slow to commit to the monumental task of providing drugs to rural patients around the world, many of whom don’t even know that they’re infected. But in the past few years, boosted by the Bush administration’s five-year, $15 billion AIDS program and an organized international effort, the project began to have effect.

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