June 1: The one-day-old smallpox scare has virtually blown over with a senior World Health Organisation official asserting there was no outbreak in Bangladesh or Myanmar.

A foreign ministry communique about the alleged outbreak had prompted the Bengal government yesterday to declare a statewide alert and screening of passengers from the two neighbouring countries at the Calcutta airport, port and border posts.

But today health minister Surjya Kanta Mishra said he had been informed verbally by the WHO that there was no cause for worry. “We will not withdraw the alert, however, till a written communication arrives,” he said.

“We’ve checked with offices in Bangladesh and Myanmar — there’s no smallpox,” Jai Narain, the director of the communicable diseases division at the WHO office in New Delhi, told The Telegraph.

“Some other illness with rash may have been mistaken for smallpox. There’s no smallpox in nature any more.”

The WHO had certified the world free from smallpox in 1979, two years after the last case in Somalia. The only other known cases were caused by a laboratory accident in 1978 in Birmingham, UK, which killed one person and caused a small outbreak.

The virus is now believed to be stored in only two authorised laboratories in the US and Russia amid simmering debate whether they should be destroyed or preserved for research.

“There are concerns that if the stocks get into the wrong hands, they may be used for bio-terrorism,” a leading virologist said. But a WHO-led inspection of the two repositories two years ago had reaffirmed the security of the stocks.

Scientists believe that any deliberate or accidental release of the virus would be a “catastrophe” for the world. Many countries stopped immunisation against smallpox in the ’70s or early ’80s. Most people under 30 today have never received a smallpox vaccination and are likely to be highly susceptible.

Narain said rumours about smallpox arise every once in a while and are checked out. “Such rumours help us refine our disease surveillance and alert system,” he said.