BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS UPDATE
30 April 2006
In this issue:
Previous editions of Biological Weapons Update are available
at: http://www.basicint.org/update/bwu.htm.
Anthrax developments
On February 23 the Salt Lake City Weekly ran a disturbing
article on the
decision in 2003 by the U.S. Army's procurement officers at
the Dugway Proving Grounds to quietly place orders for a system
of bacteria-growing fermentors. The order called for four
fermentors with a total production capacity of nearly 3,500
liters of bacteria and the possibility of another five fermentors
in the future. That is enough bacteria-making equipment to
cook up about three-fourths the 8,400 liters of anthrax Iraq
admitted to having produced for Saddam's biowar program.
A study in the March 24 Cell reported
the discovery of a gene that drives the anthrax bacteria's
toxic effects. The gene could offer a potential new target
for countermeasures against the lethal toxin. Such therapies
might have the potential to protect against anthrax during
the late stages of the disease, after antibiotics have lost
their therapeutic value.
Scientists funded by the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases have engineered a powerful inhibitor of
anthrax toxin that worked well in small-scale animal tests.
The research appears in the April 23 online edition
of the journal Nature Biotechnology.
The Washington Post
reported April 5 that the federal Food and Drug Administration
accused VaxGen Inc., a
California company, of illegally exaggerating claims about
the purity and effectiveness of a new vaccine for anthrax.
"To anybody's knowledge, there was no fermentation
capacity anywhere near that size at Dugway until this decision
to build it," said Edward Hammond, who keeps an eye on bioweapons
research from his Texas-based Sunshine Project. "A few years
ago, if somebody did that it would be viewed as possibly a
smoking gun of an offensive program. It would probably get
the Iranians bombed if they did that at one of their facilities."
On April 16 to 18 the Frederick News-Post in Maryland published
a three-part "Beyond the Breach" series
detailing multiple episodes of anthrax contamination during
April 2002 at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of
Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Control in the former Soviet Union
Global Security Newswire
reported March 28 that a U.S. program to secure and catalog
biological agents at former Soviet laboratories has moved
forward quickly in recent years, with increased cooperation
from five former Soviet republics - Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan,
Ukraine and Uzbekistan - speeding progress.
At the CBW Breakfast Seminar on March 28, Scott A. Levac,
an international project manager from the U.S. Defense Threat
Reduction Agency (DTRA), gave the first public briefing on the Threat
Agent Detection and Response (TADR) Project in Central Asia
and Caucasus. He described in detail the objectives of the
project, the current level of cooperation with the host countries,
and the impediments that remain.
Deliberate deceptions over Iraqi mobile
laboratories
The Washington Post
reported April 12 that the claim by President Bush on
May 29, 2003 that two small trailers captured by U.S. and
Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological
laboratories" was known to be false by the U.S. government
even as he made the claim. A secret fact-finding mission to
Iraq had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to
do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored
mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington
in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's
statement.
The three-page field report and a 122-page final report (Final
Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected
Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers) were stamped "secret"
and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration
and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that
the trailers were weapons factories.
Laboratories news
The race to be selected as the site of the future National
Bio and Agro-Defense Facility continues unabated as state
and local politicians in
nine states vie to bring home the biological bacon to
their constituents. See these reports from
Kansas,
Mississippi, and Texas. Though
some local residents are beginning to raise concerns as Global
Security Newswire
reported.
In late March the Cleveland Plain Dealer published an extraordinary
seven part series
on the case of Dr. Thomas Butler, one of the leading experts
on plague who was arrested in 2003, tried, convicted on 47
counts, and subsequently imprisoned for two years, when vials
of plague in his lab went missing. The articles demonstrate
how the fear whipped up by the bioterrorist threat-mongering
can take down a guiltless man and trample on personal and
civil liberties.
Planning for bio-terrorism
In late March Interpol hosted a three-day
workshop in Singapore on the
threat of bioterrorism in Asia, gathering senior police
and government officials from 37 countries around Asia. The
delegates discussed lab
security, forensic work and laws to prevent bioterrorism,
as well as how to respond to a simulated bioterrorist attack.
The St. Louis Post Dispatch
reported March 28 that the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention plan to place antibiotics in 5,000 homes in
the St. Louis area in a first-of-its kind test to learn how
people would handle drugs given them to prepare for a bioterrorism
attack.
The Washington Post
reported April 7 that the Bush administration acknowledged
it still lacks a strategic plan for countering bioterror threats
two years after Congress created a special program and appropriated
billions of dollars for the purpose, and it pledged fresh
efforts to speed up and streamline the troubled Project BioShield.
Smallpox vaccinations live on
Bloomberg.com reported
March 11 that researchers at the International Conference
on Emerging Infectious Diseases said that vaccinations received
decades ago would help many people survive a smallpox attack
by terrorists even as the shots make the deadly infection
harder to detect and control.
Publications
The LDL
Receptor-Related Protein LRP6 Mediates Internalization and
Lethality of Anthrax Toxin, Cell, Vol 124, 1141-1154,
24 March 2006
National Security Notes,
March 31, 2006
A VACCINE FOR THE HYPE
OUT OF THE BOX AND BOTTLE
TWO DOMESTIC RICIN CONVICTIONS
PUT THE BOTOX ON YOUR SHOES AND LEGS
Back to Basics:
Steering Constructive Evolution of the BWC, Arms Control
Today, April 2006
Biosecurity
and Secrecy Policy: Problems, Theory, and a Call for Executive
Action, I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information
Society, Vol. 2, Issue 2 (2006)
The Soviet Anti-Plague
System, Center for NonProliferation Studies
Defining "Weapons of
Mass Destruction", Center for the Study of Weapons of
Mass Destruction, January 2006, W. Seth Carus, National Defense
University Press
Websites
SMALLPOXBIOSAFETY.ORG. This site, started
in April 2005, is the home of an international effort to prevent
the genetic engineering of smallpox and to ensure prompt destruction
of all remaining stocks of the live smallpox virus.
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