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Deadly germs may be more likely to be spread due to a biodefence lab accident than a biological attack by terrorists. Plague, anthrax, Rocky Mountain spotted fever - these are among the bioweapons some experts fear could be used in a germ warfare attack against the US. But the public has had near-misses with those diseases and others over the past five years, ironically because of accidents in labs that were working to defend against bioterrorists. Even worse, they may be only the tip of an iceberg. The revelations come from Ed Hammond of the Sunshine Project, a biosafety pressure...

Plaintiff Was Called 'Person of Interest' Lawyers for former Army scientist Steven J. Hatfill urged a judge yesterday to order several journalists to disclose the names of law enforcement sources who leaked details of the investigation of Hatfill in the 2001 anthrax attacks. Hatfill, a physician and bioterrorism expert, has not been charged in the attacks, in which five people were killed and 17 were sickened by anthrax bacteria mailed in envelopes. In a lawsuit, he accuses the Justice Department of violating the federal Privacy Act by giving the news media information about the FBI's investigation of him. To help...

Immediately following 9-11, an anthrax attack originating from letters containing anthrax spores infected 22 people, killing five.  After almost six years, the case has not been solved.  Intelligence analysts and academics report that North Korea has developed anthrax, plague, and botulism toxin and conducted extensive research on smallpox, typhoid and cholera.  A world-renowned bioweapons expert has confirmed that Syria has weapons grade smallpox resistant to all current vaccines developed under the cover of legitimate veterinary research  on camelpox, a very closely related virus.  The researcher further reports that Syria is suspected of testing the pathogen on prison populations and possibly...

 OPERATION: IRAQI FREEDOMBotulinum 'is WMD' State Department spokesman: Lethal bio-toxin 'kills people, it kills people in large quantities' Posted: October 4, 20031:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com The vial of botulinum bacteria discovered in Iraq by U.S. arms inspectors – which experts call the most poisonous substance known to man – is "a weapon of mass destruction," the State Department's top spokesman announced yesterday. "Botulinum kills people, it kills people in large quantities. Botulinum is a weapon of mass destruction, yes," said State spokesman Richard Boucher," according to an Agence France-Presse report. "Anything that destroys on a massive scale is a weapon...

Iraqi Documents: UNMOVIC Knew Of Renewed WMD Efforts Continuing my review of the many documents released from the DocEx files over the last two days, I found yet another interesting piece of information regarding Saddam Hussein's pursuit of WMD. In a summary of a larger document, the translators found that Iraq had restarted its processing of castor-bean extraction, from which ricin can be developed -- and that UNMOVIC discovered it in December 2002. From CMPC-2003-003766-HT.pdf, with line breaks and emphases mine: Ricin toxin is found in the bean of the castor plant. UNMOVIC inspections since December 2002 have verified that...

LONDON-The pariah state of North Korea is trying to weaponize the bird flu virus, making it the ideal threat for al-Qaida, the British intelligence agency MI6 has learned.The Bush administration has given briefings classigied "Top Secret/Sensative Compartmented Information" to members of Congress and the Senate on the threat.

UNSCOM Document defines Iraq's Extensive Biological Weapons Program. Iraq began making anthrax in 1985 and was known to continue until 1991. It achieved weaponized anthrax capabilities. Excerpts of document follow. (x) In summary, Iraq has declared the production of at least 19,000 litres of concentrated botulinum toxin (nearly 10,000 litres were filled into munitions), 8,500 litres of concentrated anthrax (some 6,500 litres were filled into munitions) and 2,200 litres of concentrated aflatoxin (1,580 litres were filled into munitions); 76. Iraq's biological weapons programme as described to the Commission embraced a comprehensive range of agents and munitions. Agents under Iraq's biological...

Read or skim the patent below for the bold text. You can read for yourselves: they consider bio and chemical agents a possible application of this 'non lethal' dispencer. Even IF this was some sort of screw- up of an overenthusiastic researcher and it was never meant to be used as such, the defence guys shold still be ashamed for not running a check on this sort of thing. If they actually consider bioagents a possible use for this contraption, well. Im not laughing. This could have led/will lead to political embarashment. ------------------------------------------------------   ( 3 of 3 ) United...

A former special investigator for the Pentagon during the Iraq war said he found four sealed underground bunkers in southern Iraq that he is sure contain stocks of chemical and biological weapons. But when he asked American weapons inspectors to check out the sites, he was rebuffed.

'Only a matter of time before terrorists use weapons of mass destruction' By Con Coughlin (Filed: 17/01/2006) Biological weapons pose a far more serious long-term terrorist threat to the West than nuclear weapons, according to Washington's leading counter-terrorism expert. And Henry "Hank" Crumpton, the newly-appointed head of counter-terrorism at the US State Department, believes that it is simply a matter of time before international terrorist groups such as al-Qa'eda acquire weapons of mass destruction and use them in attacks. Henry Crumpton refuses to rule out the military option to tame Iran's nuclear amitions In an exclusive interview with The Daily...

Al-Qaida is recruiting suicide bombers who are infected with the AIDS virus, according to Britain's Sunday Mirror. The newspaper reported that terror chiefs are also targeting fanatics who suffer other lethal blood diseases such as hepatitis and dengue fever in order to increase their "kill rate" from an explosion. The chilling new threat is revealed in papers distributed to British military camps in Iraq and across Europe. Under the heading "HIV/Hepatitis" the document states: "There is evidence that terrorists might be deliberately recruiting volunteers with diseases that are spread by blood transference." Experts have found that bones and other blood-spattered...

Guest opinion: U.S. vets deserve answers on biochemical tests By J.B. STONE The U.S. Army's Project 112 and its Navy component, Project SHAD, started in 1961 when Robert McNamara and President Kennedy allotted $4 billion and 10 years to create a biochemical juggernaut. Decades of unanswered questions had just begun. In Judith Miller's 1999 book, "Germs", William Capers Patrick III, the head of Bio-Chemical Weapons development programs at Fort Detrick, Md., for more than 30 years, states: "We didn't sit around talking about the moral implications of what we were doing. We were problem-solving ... you never connected it to...

Joe Wilson, Iraq war supporter? The darling of the anti-war left may be working overtime to bring down the Bush administration for "outing" his CIA wife, but Wilson said Saturday that the White House was right to go to war over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. "There was a lot of reason to be concerned about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein," he told WABC Radio's Mark Simone. "I always thought that he probably had chemical and biological weapons and biological precursors as well." Wilson said his primary policy difference with President Bush wasn't over Saddam's...

A power failure knocked out the security system at a federal germ lab in Fort Collins for 13 hours Monday and disabled freezers housing thousands of vials of plague and other potential bioweapons. A backup generator kicked on when the power failed. But an electrical short prevented the backup power from being routed through the building, said Colorado State University spokesman Brad Bohlander. As a result, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laboratory was without power for 13 hours, beginning at 3:07 p.m. Monday, Bohlander said. CSU owns the building and leases it to the government.No germ collections were...

Biowarfare : Another “Sverdlosk Incident” in Russia ? I’ve been looking at two recent (and ongoing) outbreaks of Tularemia in Russia: (Source: ProMed : Archives # 20050824.2503; # 20050822.2467; # 20050718.2066 ) 1. 96 people –66 from Dzerzhinsk region; 30 from Nizhniy Novogorod. 2. 56 people – all from the Ryazan area , which borders on Nizhniy Novogorod and Vladimir. What makes it notable is that Tularemia is a fairly rare disease: the Ryazan area had only 4 known cases in 2004. (No historic stats were furnished on the Nizhniy Novgoros area or Dzerzhinsk , but the number of cases...

In personal meetings with Saddam Hussein, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro have both promised bio-weapons. The lab, complete with Cuban scientists, is now in Venezuela.

Once Mined for Pathogens in Bioweapons Program, Labs Lack Security ODESSA, Ukraine -- For 50 years under Soviet rule, nearly everything about the Odessa Antiplague Station was a state secret, down to the names of the deadly microbes its white-coated workers collected and stored in a pair of ordinary freezers. Cloistered in a squat, gray building at the tip of a rusting shipping dock, the station's biologists churned out reports on grave illnesses that were mentioned only in code. Anthrax was Disease No. 123, and plague, which killed thousands here in the 19th century, was No. 127. Each year, researchers...

Chinese Ministry of Health Wednesday denied reports of a nationwide outbreak of anthrax, saying it is under monitoring as a regular infectious disease. "Starting monitoring in some regions does not mean anthrax is breaking out in these regions. We are monitoring other infectious diseases as well," said a media coordinator of the ministry's information office. The ministry on Tuesday issued a plan to monitor anthrax in the provinces of Gansu, Liaoning, Guizhou, Sichuan, Qinghai, Chongqing Municipality and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. In the last five years, 400 to 1,000 people were infected with anthrax each year, according to figures released...

Government Conference on Tackling Avian Flu and Ebola: late June, in Guandong Province.Confernce on Ebola Problem held at Guangzhou Military District: early July

Posting note: Gleaned from shaky translation of a Russian press report.Reliability ? Thursday, June 09, 2005 Russians Investigating Possible Bio-Attack Investigators are checking whether the mass outbreak of hepatitis A in the Tver region near Moscow could be linked to the bio-weapons sector. At the moment 363 people are in hospital, and some newspapers have linked the outbreak to the recent murder of Russia’s leading specialist in bio weapons. The outbreak began at the end of May in the Tver region and has now reached the neighboring region of Smolensk, agencies report. It was initially blamed on a local soft...