Sounds pretty innocent to me - and a damned good thing altogether, if this pest population can be controlled via this rather benign means. To the researchers' surprise and shock, this slight accidental alteration resulted in an extremely virulent pox, which wiped out all of the test mice with a few days. It is theorized that a procedure along the lines stated above could result in an even more virulent strain of human smallpox upon which vaccinations would be wholly ineffective. The best and brightest young minds in Iraq worked on the project for years. Saddam wants to make the Big Statement to the world that he is a total player.
Smallpox is a horrible disease.
It's airborne, and spreads quite rapidly. The symptomology reads like some bad science fiction novel - but it's real. It's also within reason to assume that somewhere, agents of governments with evil intent have taken this information, and are working to come up with something devastating to all of us. And here we are, fully into the new millennium, racing toward decoding the human genome, fabricating a space station to push forward the frontiers of space, revolutionizing business paradigms through computer technology. And in walked Murphy.