Free Republic

BEIJING (Aug. 3)- A second man has died of pneumonic plague in northwest China, in an outbreak that prompted authorities to lock down a town where about a dozen people were infected with the highly contagious deadly lung disease, a state news agency said. The World Health Organization office in China said it was in close contact with Chinese health authorities and that measures taken so far to treat and quarantine sickened people were appropriate. The man who died Sunday was identified only as 37-year-old Danzin from Ziketan, the stricken town in Qinghai province, the official Xinhua News Agency said....

‘Germ warfare’ fear over African monkeys taken to Iran Daniel Foggo Hundreds of endangered monkeys are being taken from the African bush and sent to a “secretive” laboratory in Iran for scientific experiments. An undercover inquiry by The Sunday Times has revealed that wild monkeys, which are banned from experiments in Britain, are being freely supplied in large numbers to laboratories in other parts of the world. All will undergo invasive and maybe painful experiments leading ultimately to their death. One Tanzanian dealer, Nazir Manji, who runs African Primates, an animal-supplying company based in Dar es Salaam, said that in...

Britain and America's most guarded germ warfare secrets have been known to the Russians for decades and spies continue to operate at the heart of the West's biotechnology industry, a former KGB spymaster says today. Alexander Kouzminov also discloses that covert Soviet sabotage agents prepared secret sites where phials of lethal bacteria would be left, ready to poison western military establishments, civilian settlements and even assassinate political leaders in the event of war with the Soviet Union. The scientist, once a senior member of the KGB unit responsible for biological espionage, says that the secrets of Porton Down and the...

Experts have deciphered the complete DNA sequence for one of the most infectious germs known to science. The Francisella tularensis bacterium is a candidate bioterror weapon, as it takes just 10 microbes to bring on disease in humans. The genome sequencing work is already speeding up the search for a vaccine against the potentially deadly bug. An international team, including UK Ministry of Defence scientists, report their findings in Nature Genetics. "There aren't any [other pathogens] I can think of that are more infectious," said co-author Professor Richard Titball, of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down,...

I remember seeing a thread on FR shortly after 9/11 about several muslim websites that had "artwork" showing our land being laid desolate and dead. There would always be a few mosquitoes, and small, greenish-yellow flower or 2 in each shot (representing biological warfare), and then a tall white horse (representing the Arab) running through the desolation. There were many pictures, all of them pretty much having the same theme only with different landscapes in the background. (The Empire state building, the Grand Canyon, etc.) This was maybe during the Anthrax letters scare.Does anyone else remember seeing this, or maybe...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States, yet to find evidence to back its charge that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, issued a new accusation on Thursday that Cuba had a "limited" biological arms program. Cuba has previously denied the accusation, repeated on Thursday by Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere Roger Noriega at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Cuba. Noriega was responding to a question from Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut, who asked why Washington continued to enforce a four-decade sanctions regime against Havana. Dodd quoted Secretary of State Colin Powell as having...

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- New Jersey health officials were awaiting test results Tuesday to determine if a child from the state is infected with monkeypox. The 11-year-old boy came into contact with a pair of prairie dogs while visiting a family friend in a Midwestern state where the infection has spread, state officials said. Results on blood and lesion samples from the boy sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are expected in several days. Nationally, health officials were working to contain the spread of the monkeypox virus, which is related to smallpox and apparently has never before...

A gathering of advocates of "regime change" in Iraq in one of Washington's oldest gentlemen's clubs could easily have been an occasion for self-congratulation that Saddam Hussein was about to be overthrown by American forces. Instead the neo-conservative true believers heard a sobering warning from Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy Pentagon chief, that the Iraqi dictator was poised to use chemical and biological weapons against American troops. There was a collective intake of breath at the starkness of what Mr Wolfowitz said as he stood in the centre of the oak-panelled reading room of the Metropolitan Club, founded in 1872 for...

AN elusive fleet of nondescript trucks crisscrossing Iraq is believed by Western intelligence sources to be carrying biological weapons. The suspected mobile weapons labs that rumble along Iraq's highways and crowded streets may look like ice cream trucks, motor homes or 18-wheeler tractor trailer trucks, officials and experts told the Los Angeles Times. But their cargo is believed to be germ agents such as anthrax, botulinum toxin and aflatoxin that theoretically could kill hundreds of thousands in an attack. The vehicles have been dubbed "Winnebagos of death", and are extremely difficult to find, even with sophisticated sensors. They now pose...

The scientists could have been studying germ warfare Some of Britain's top laboratories were infiltrated by Iraqi scientists researching germ warfare in the run-up to the Gulf War, a scientist has claimed. Iraqi scientists - financed by generous grants from the Iraqi government - reportedly applied for and gained research posts in academic and medical institutions. Dr Joseph Selkon, a leading Oxford microbiologist, told BBC Radio 4's File on 4 that the infiltration was discovered after he became suspicious about one Iraqi research applicant. His suspicions sparked extra security checks, which revealed that leading microbiology laboratories had been targeted by...

WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (AFP) - Iraq could unleash a biological attack on the West by using unsuspecting people traveling abroad as carriers of deadly germs, a prominent Iraqi defector warned late Thursday. Nuclear scientist Khidhir Hamza, who left Iraq in 1994 and now lives in the United States, told the US Congress he suspected the Iraqi security service, which runs the country's biological weapons program, had already used people traveling abroad to reunite with relatives to infect exiled dissidents with the deadly AIDS virus. "An angle rarely reported -- and I found extensive incidents regarding it when I left...

A top secret document detailing Britain's post-war biological weapons research was sent to Pakistani officials by mistake. Papers released by the Public Record Office say it was sent to the High Commissioner for Pakistan 15 years later. A test programme for studying ways to turn the plague, anthrax and other deadly diseases into weapons was described in the 1947 file. Officials at the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence were forced to send their "sincere regrets" over the blunder to the US Government, which had co-operated in the work, Some parts of the 1947 Report on Biological Warfare are...