| Subject: Killer diseases which silence victims |
Author:
No name
| [ Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
]
Date Posted: 15:24:23 12/03/01 Mon
Irish Independent Sunday November 11th 2001
Killer diseases which silence victims http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=10&si=637540&issue_id =6380
The US is not alone in developing deadly bio-weapons, says Joe MacAnthony
As Osama bin Laden continues to roam among the snow-capped mountains of Afghanistan and US bombs carpet the plains, an uneasy peace takes hold elsewhere. Apart from traces found at four New Jersey post offices last week which may be linked to the original attack, the anthrax assault seems over, with billions spent, a world in uproar and final casualties listed as four dead and twelve sick. Now we face a depressing winter, with images of starving children and massive job losses in the newspapers. This war on global terrorism leaves little to cheer about.
Unfortunately, bad as it seems, this stuttering war may soon prove the least of our worries. Growing evidence is now emerging that something far more ominous is developing in the wings. Unknown to most, a biological weapons competition far more dangerous than bin Laden or the Cold Wars arms race is gathering momentum in democracies and dictatorships alike. And this time, possibly for the first in history, rich and and poor nations are equal contenders.
The contest is shrouded in secrecy and shows little visible evidence of what is happening. Principally because the work involved is done in heavily guarded laboratories and inside military compounds with governments, free or otherwise, striving to avoid involvement. Occasionally, a clue to what is happening emerges in an obscure scientific journal. All too rarely, when people sicken from the work and concealment fails, a fragment gets into the papers.
It happened last May when a 33-year-old man with fever and respiratory problems was admitted to a hospital in Maryland. Although ill for six weeks before admission and now in a life-threatening condition, the patient kept quiet.
Only after he was transferred to the world-renowned Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore did the truth come out. His illness was diagnosed, not through medical skills but from checking the patient's 'occupational address'. He turned out to be a microbiologist at the US Army centre for Biological Warfare in nearby Fort Detrick. He had a long-forgotten disease called glanders which is almost entirely confined to horses, donkeys and mules. It appears so rarely in humans that the last person to be treated for it in the US before the microbiologist was discharged in 1948.
The patient belonged to a 19-member team developing a vaccine to protect humans against glanders, which the doctors found puzzling. No-one had ever recorded a glanders epidemic in humans. Even in cases where the disease flourished, transference was virtually non-existent.. In Mongolia, where glanders ran as high as 25 per cent in equines, no case of transference to humans were discovered.
So why would a US army team of 19 highly trained professionals spend two years trying to create a vaccine out of material so virulent it almost killed one of them and for which there appears to be nopractical use?
The answer to that question, once grasped, reveals why the escalating interest in biological weapons is becoming hazardous not only to lab workers but to everyone else's health too.
Glanders had a moderate and decidedly ancient history as a biological weapon, with the Germans using it in the First World War to infect horses used by the Russian army to draw their supply convoys and move their artillery. The Japanese also tried it later in China. Neither perpetrator had much success.
The US began experimenting with glanders during the Second World War. Reports say they didn't weaponise it, as the Russians did later. It was around this time that a serious change of opinion on glanders occurred. During lab work, the disease was found to be highly effective, with a 46 per cent success rate and severe results, ie fatalities, when spread by aerosol.. A second discovery was that when the bacillus was taken out of its natural environment it had a higher kill rate than anthrax or even smallpox. It was the delivery system, not virulence, that left the disease shambling behind its rivals as a biological weapon.
It might have remained that way if improved delivery systems and the development of genetic engineering had not arrived on the scene. Combined with the disease's admired virulence (researchers talk this way), it helped restore glanders' edge as a biological weapon against humans. Apart from that, it is a virtue to the Americans for being a devastating weapon in Afghanistan where the Taliban are reliant on mules and donkeys for moving weaponry and supplies through the mountains.
It is, of course, against international treaty to manufacture biological weapons like glanders for use in places like Afghanistan or anywhere else. But there is a loophole. Countries are allowed to develop vaccines to protect against biological attack. And since you cannot create an effective vaccine without thorough knowledge of the attacking weapon, you must be allowed to build the weapon first.
This is what every country involved with biological weaponry is now doing. Arguing that it made no sense to build vaccines for inferior weapons, their creations have become increasing virulent.
Not long ago, stockpiling weaponry would have breached international law. In the Eighties, for instance, the Russians had to hide 4,500 tons of anthrax from detection. Today's laboratory needs only a handful of vials to source enough pathogens to kill millions. As to complaints, bioweaponeers like to point out that they need those vials to develop more vaccines should they be needed.
While sidestepping the ban, downsizing weapons and improving delivery would ensure a global devastation comparable to a nuclear winter, it is no longer enough for those on the cutting edge. They want to develop even more hazardous creations. You will know them by the sophistication of the vaccines they produce, which in turn identifies the virulence of the weapons they stock. The world leader is the biological warfare establishment at Porton Downs in Wiltshsire, England. It has already produced vaccines for the most virulent forms of smallpox, anthrax and plague, for which it now has weapons. Even now, it is seeking volunteers to test plague and admits to developing a vaccine for a particularly hideous bacillus, clostridium perfringus, which produces an agonising form of gas gangrene where the afflicted person lives as his body putrefies.
Even more appalling, within a vast compound surrounded by guards and protected by fences, it enjoys the approval of the British Government for developing a new family of the most virulent biological weaponry on earth. The plan is to use genetic engineering to add a new strain to weapons like anthrax which will make them resistant to antibiotics and thereby remove any possibility of recovery by those with the misfortune to be stricken.
Perhaps worst of all is the prospect of expertise at Porton Downs evolving to a point and it may have already done so where it could target a particular gene pool, such as people of colour, and make it more than theoretically feasible to destroy that particular section of the population without doing harm to their white neighbours.
IG Farben was rightly reviled when they filled Nazi production orders for Zyklon B gas which they used to kill millions of Jews. What is horrifying in recent biological weapon development is the zeal shown by those involved and their political masters to preserve the means, should a democracy fail or a nihilist like Adolf Hitler take power, to kill many millions more than even the Nazis contemplated.
© Irish Independent http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/ & http://www.unison.ie/
===================================================== "Not all truths need to be told. Some shouldn't. But those that should are those which cause the innocent to suffer, and create a divide between people because of lies .... even lies of silence."
--- From "People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil" by M. Scott Peck, M.D. =====================================================
[
Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
] |
|
Feedback: 