Welcome to Vector-might be a little difficult to get the vaccine after all baraq and his gang have been doing to Russia lately-can US intelligence or any intel agency really track a bio-weapon attacker? Apparently ebola is unsuitable as a bio-weapon.
The Siberian complex known as Vector was a top Soviet research facility for bioweapons. Today, its scientists study defenses against Ebola and other pathogens. A lab worker accidentally contracted Ebola in 2004 while working on vaccines. (Joby Warrick/The Washington Post)
She was an ordinary lab technician with an uncommonly dangerous assignment: drawing blood from Ebola-infected animals in a secret military laboratory. When she cut herself at work one day, she decided to keep quiet, fearing she’d be in trouble. Then the illness struck.
“By the time she turned to a doctor for help, it was too late,” one of her overseers, a former bioweapons scientist, said of the accident years afterward. The woman died quickly and was buried, according to one account, in a “sack filled with calcium hypochlorite,” or powdered bleach.
The 1996 incident might have been forgotten except for the pathogen involved — a highly lethal strain of Ebola virus — and where the incident occurred: inside a restricted Russian military lab that was once part of the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program. Years ago, the same facility in the Moscow suburb of Sergiev Posad cultivated microbes for use as tools of war. Today, much of what goes on in the lab remains unknown.
The fatal lab accident and a similar one in 2004 offer a rare glimpse into a 35-year history of Soviet and Russian interest in the Ebola virus. The research began amid intense secrecy with an ambitious effort to assess Ebola’s potential as a biological weapon, and it later included attempts to manipulate the virus’s genetic coding, U.S. officials and researchers say. Those efforts ultimately failed as Soviet scientists stumbled against natural barriers that make Ebola poorly suited for biowarfare.
The bioweapons program officially ended in 1991, but Ebola research continued in Defense Ministry laboratories, where it remains largely invisible despite years of appeals by U.S. officials to allow greater transparency. Now, at a time when the world is grappling with anunprecedented Ebola crisis, the wall of secrecy surrounding the labs looms still larger, arms-control experts say, feeding conspiracy theories and raising suspicions.
“The bottom line is, we don’t know what they’re doing with any of the pathogens in their possession,” said Amy Smithson, a biological weapons expertwho has traveled to several of the labs and written extensively about the Soviet-era weapons complex.
At least four military labs have remained off-limits to any outside scrutiny since the end of the Cold War, even as civilian-run institutions adopted more transparent policies and permitted collaborations with foreign researchers and investors, U.S. officials and weapons experts say. Even acknowledging — as most experts do — that Russia halted work on offensive bioweapons decades ago, the program’s opacity is a recurring irritant in diplomatic relations and a source of worry for security and health experts who cite risks ranging from unauthorized or rogue experiments to the theft or accidental escape of deadly microbes.
Enhancing the threat is the facilities’ collection of deadly germs, which presumably includes the strains Soviet scientists tried to manipulate to make them hardier, deadlier and more difficult to detect, said Smithson, now a senior fellow with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a research institute based in Monterey, Calif.
“We have ample accounts from defectors that these are not just strains from nature, but strains that have been deliberately enhanced,” she said.
Other countries, including the United States, also conduct military research on defending against biological threats, including Ebola — a fact that draws criticism from some health experts and charges of hypocrisy from Russia. Pentagon officials counter that U.S. biodefense laboratories are subject to oversight and regular inspections by outside agencies.
Russian officials defend their right to military secrecy and point to tangible benefits from years of Ebola research. This month, Russian officials announced experimental Ebola vaccines developed by the same two labs that lost workers to Ebola accidents: the Defense Ministry’s Microbiology Research Institute at Sergiev Posad and the Vector Center for Virology and Biotechnologies in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk.
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HEY BARRY: from the Washington Post. By the way, it was Guinea, and not Ghana where the health care workers got knifed. Sorry for that, I was off by a few hundred miles.
Why the brutal murder of several Ebola workers may hint at more violence to come
Moses Tarkulah stands by as colleagues enter the suspected Ebola case ward in Monrovia, Liberia, on Sept. 16, 2014. (Michel du Cille/The Washington Post)
Seven months, thousands of dead and a global crisis later, the murders occurred where it all began — in the remote forests of southeast Guinea, where superstition overwhelms education and whispers of Ebola stoke fear and sometimes violence.
The team of journalists and health workers arrived this week at the distant village of Womey to spread awareness of Ebola, the Guardian reported, where mention of lethal disease are met with denials and suspicion. Despite that, the initial meeting with villagers was promising.
“The meeting started off well,” one resident who was present at the talkstold the Guardian. “The traditional chiefs welcomed the delegation with 10 kola nuts as a traditional greeting. It was afterwards that some youths came out and started stoning them. They dragged some of them away, and damaged their vehicles.”
Initially, Guinea officials claimed the aid workers and journalists had been taken captive and that distrustful residents had torn down bridges, prohibiting entry into the village. And then on Thursday night the news arrived. “The eight bodies were found in the village latrine,” government spokesman Damantang Albert Camara told Reuters. “Three of them had their throats slit.” He added in a separate interview: They were “killed in cold blood by the villagers.”
It was the most horrific act of Ebola-related violence to date in any of the affected countries. But it was far from the first display of local aggression. As the numbers of dead has surged, so has the violence: from an attack on a Guinea medical center in early April through the brandishing of knives in July to this week’s murders. The dangers under which health workers try to function appear to be heightening, as frightened locals continue to blame doctors for perpetuating the virus. And as Ebola spreads — 700 more cases were announced this week and the number of dead doubled this month — so may the acts of violence.
“We don’t want them in there at all,” Marcel Dambadounou, a Guinea village chief told the New York Times in July, referring to doctors and aid workers battling Ebola. “We don’t accept their presence at all. They are the transporters of the virus in these communities.” He added: “We are absolutely afraid, and that’s why we are avoiding contact with everybody — the whole world.”
The increase in violence marks a new dark chapter in the fight against Ebola, which has now killed at least 2,622 people, infected at least 5,335 people and pushed three West African nations into a state of emergency. Also troubling is the impact on aid workers of threats, harassment and violence. Some doctors and nurses, reported Inter Press Service, have stopped wearing their uniforms because they’re scared they will provoke attacks on the street.
“Health staff actually get [stones thrown at them] and it can become very violent,” Fabio Friscia, a United Nations coordinator for the Ebola awareness campaign, told GlobalPost. “…It is absolutely something we could expect. The population is being attacked by an absolutely new disease no one [in Western Africa] has ever seen before.”
During other outbreaks as well, some locals, driven by a combination of fright and superstition, attacked health workers. In a 2003 Ebola flare-up in Congo, volunteers with the Red Cross were chased by locals wielding clubs and knives, according to the Toronto Star. “You come roaring in with a team dressed in white suits and masks … you’ll have problems,” Ronald St. John, an infectious disease expert who has worked with the World Health Organization, told writer Scott Johnson.
Some say they have more confidence in tribal doctors, who prescribe remedies that do little to combat the pandemic. “This is very unusual, that we are not trusted,” Marc Poncin, emergency coordinator in Guinea for Doctors Without Borders, told the New York Times earlier in the summer. “We’re not stopping the epidemic.”
So in some villages such in Kolo Bengou, Guinea, youths equipped with slingshots and machetes guard local roads against aid workers, the Times reported. “We don’t want any visitors,” their leader said. “We don’t want any contact with anyone,” referring to Doctors Without Borders. “Wherever those people have passed, the communities have been hit by illness.
"How can you track movements when people are free to move around?"
Every time someone crosses the border legally, they get registered/scanned/numbered and can therefore be tracked.
"Are you both talking about controlled movements?"
I'm only talking about the uselessness of closed borders vs. open borders.
"You both need to explain how a virus can be controlled when you allow people to leave an airport."
It can not be controlled, but it can be tracked and when all suspected carriers have been tracked, they can be contained.
"Have you got MSM proof of the throat cutting"
Here's one of the many stories on this:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-29256443
superstition and almost no education are the obvious reasons why many 3rd world countries will always be 3rd world countries-years ago I had a man from pr who worked for me-he said his mother told him when you eat the food goes to your legs and he beleived it-we said no it goes into your stomach but he insisted he went to your legs
Everyone seems to be trying to develope vaccines for Ebola today. I've seen multiple private corps invested in the project as well as multiple govts.
All those on here that claims that Ebola vaccine will be dangerous will soon have to specify exactly which of the vaccines they mean are dangerous and which are supposed to be seen as safe.
ACUTE OBSERVER: true, but we haven't heard anything about solid time guidelines regarding ebola vaccine administration from "everybody," except the two-month announcement from the Russians.
We also haven't heard anything about Russian volunteers in the Red Cross getting their throats slit in Ghana due to suspicion of administering ebola to Ghana citizens in vaccinations, but hey, "welcome to the jungle" has been the mainstream media response with that "conspiracy theory."
"We also haven't heard anything about Russian volunteers in the Red Cross getting their throats slit in Ghana due to suspicion of administering ebola to Ghana citizens in vaccinations"
I've read plenty about Red Cross volounteers being killed in many different ways, from burning to throat-cutting due to all the supersticion. The articles never mentioned the nationalities of those attacked since it's the Act of attacking health-workers that's the problem, not who the target is.
There are people in this site too that practically advocate the "de-humanification" of Red Cross workers, so this is a real problem that we will have to deal with.
imagine if baraq stars getting a fever this week?
huge money and probably will be rushed through the approval process saving billions on r&d-so leave the borders open and raise the risk factor so everyone has to buy an ample stock just in case
If you close the borders, the risk factor actually increases since it'd mean that you'd loose control over the peoples movements. At least with the borders open, we can track everyone.
That ability is lost when the borders are closed since we all know that closed borders won't stop people from trying to pass anyway.