CIAO DATE: 06/2012
October 2002
James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies
The heart of this occasional paper is a translation of an official Soviet-era document titled “Report on Measures Taken to Contain and Eradicate the Smallpox Outbreak Locale in the City of Aralsk, September/October 1971.” This previously secret report describes and analyzes an outbreak of smallpox that occurred in autumn 1971 in Aralsk, a small city on the shore of the Aral Sea in what was then the Kazakhstan Soviet Socialist Republic. Ten persons became infected with smallpox, and three died, before the outbreak was successfully contained by means of quarantine, mass vaccination in Aralsk, and other public health measures. A contagious disease that killed about a third of its victims, smallpox was characterized by high fever, prostration, and a painful pustular rash on the face and body that left survivors with disfiguring facial scars. The 1971 smallpox outbreak in Aralsk was unusual because the Soviet Union had eradicated endemic smallpox from its territory in 1936. Moreover, the last previous outbreak of “imported” smallpox on Soviet soil had occurred a decade earlier, in 1961. Soviet health authorities kept the Aralsk outbreak secret and did not report it to the World Health Organization (WHO), as required under international agreement. Epidemics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) often went unreported, because they undermined the propaganda image of the “socialist workers’ paradise.” In this case, however, there may have been another reason for keeping the smallpox outbreak under wraps—the Aralsk outbreak could have originated in a field test of weaponized smallpox virus at the nearby Soviet biological warfare (BW) testing grounds on Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea.
Resource link: The 1971 Smallpox Epidemic in Aralsk, Kazakhstan, and the Soviet Biological Warfare Program [PDF] - 1.5M