Guard­ing against a night­mare sce­nario, FDA ap­proves new drug to counter small­pox out­break

When­ev­er the FDA ap­proves a drug, com­pa­nies usu­al­ly tout the pa­tient pop­u­la­tion that it’s go­ing to help. That’s not ex­act­ly the case for the most re­cent ap­proval to come through at the FDA, though.

Tecovir­i­mat, or Tpoxx, treats small­pox, an of­ten fa­tal in­fec­tious dis­ease that was de­clared erad­i­cat­ed in 1980 by the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion. But strains of the virus that caus­es the ail­ment still ex­ist — there are two known sam­ples stored in labs in Rus­sia and the US, and at least one pre­vi­ous dis­cov­ery of for­got­ten vials — which, when un­leashed, could cause a lethal pan­dem­ic. Add that to the pos­si­bil­i­ty that ter­ror­ists can re­build the virus us­ing gene-edit­ing tech­niques, and dis­as­ter sce­nar­ios abound.

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