system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:Why are diseases that have been eliminated kept in labs.What if the labs get contaminated and the disease spreads again?
gpt
they are kept in case some country or terrorist group has an unregistered secret culture (a viable or dormant preserved form of the disease) that they may use for biological warfare. If, say, smallpox was released to the public in a terrorist act, everyone born after the 1970s when they stopped vaccinating would be susceptible to the disease. The idea behind keeping cultures of these diseases is to allow the quick and workable design of a new vaccine for a hyper-mutated weaponised strain in the event of attack, to eliminate loss of life. However the debate behind keeping these cultures is rife and the potential risks may outweigh the benefit. Basically, they should probably just cook the cultures and be done with it but we can't be sure that someone isn't harbouring the disease in some secret place.