Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat

[AdamG]

"Oops"

http://www.katv.com/story/18858431/c...-germ-lab-leak

ATLANTA, GA. - It's a highly secured, sophisticated research lab studying deadly diseases such as bird flu, monkeypox, tuberculosis and rabies.

It's in a facility called Building 18, which cost taxpayers $214 million.

And now, the Biosafety Level 3 lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta is also the subject of a congressional investigation after a potentially dangerous airflow leak at that lab, CNN has learned.

The leak occurred on February 16, when air flowed the wrong way out of a germ lab into a clean-air corridor, rather than through the powerful HEPA filter that cleans the air, congressional sources and CDC officials said. Visitors touring the facility were in the clean corridor when they observed a puff of air being pushed out from the lab through a slot in a door window.

Life imitates Stephen King.

[flagg]

Scientists explain how they created bird flu that spreads easily among mammals

By Eryn Brown / The Los Angeles Times
Friday, June 22, 2012 -

http://news.bostonherald.com/news/na...osition=recent

[davidbfpo]

I am not sure that this thread's title is fit for purpose now. Yes there are several initial posts on the bio threat and recently we have returned to the issues around the scientific pursuit of biological threats. It is almost as if the title should be Assessing Biological weapons & threats: the insider threat.

[davidbfpo]

I have merged an October-December 2011 thread on the insider threat 'Dutch Researcher Created A Super-Influenza Virus With The Potential To Kill Millions', with eighteen posts, into this thread. They now appear as posts 13-30.

[AdamG]

We’ve all seen the movies. We’re in a war room with some general at the screen. There’s one innocuous red dot on a map. The dot becomes a circle. The circle becomes many circles. The many circles amplify exponentially to become one big red map. And we’re all going to be doomed by some airborne strain of zombie ebola within a week.

The reality of a contagion’s spread, however, is much different than the movies may portray. And researchers at the MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) have been working on more accurate, more complex models of disease spread. They’re particularly interested in the first few days of an epidemic, and the role of the 40 largest airports in the U.S. So they turned to traveler cell-phone data from previous MIT research to model accurate human mobility patterns--the real typical actions of travelers (including pesky layovers and tedious connecting flights)--rather than conjectural patterns.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670351/...ead-a-pandemic

[AdamG]

The Obama administration held a meeting today in Washington with the representatives of more than two dozen countries on how to confront “a perfect storm of converging threats from infectious disease epidemics.”

For once, the current administration seems ready to consider ways to prevent, detect and respond to infectious diseases where they originate:

- See more at: http://acdemocracy.org/could-rabbit-....osFZgX42.dpuf

[AdamG]

A major French biomedical research body, the Pasteur Institute, have launched an investigation into the disappearance of some 2,300 test tubes containing samples of the SARS virus. The loss was discovered during an inventory.

The Pasteur Institute filed a so-called 'complaint against X' on Monday over the lost SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) samples. According to French law, such complaints allow law enforcement agencies to investigate a certain case, without targeting specific individuals or companies.

The distinguished research body has also announced it has closed its P3 laboratory, where the samples of the potentially deadly virus were kept.

"Human error is the most probable reason, but we do not exclude anything,” the Institute’s Director General, Christian Bréchot, said, according to AFP.

http://rt.com/news/lost-sars-samples-france-608/