1932-1942: THE ORIGINS OF BIOLOGICAL WARFARE / UNIT 731

* The use of disease as a weapon is nothing new. Centuries ago, armies would occasionally catapult the bodies of people who had died of plagues into cities under siege in hopes of spreading disease, a tactic that often proved successful. English colonists in the New World on occasion gave blankets and other items that had belonged to people who had died of smallpox to local native tribes, and the results could be devastating since the natives had little resistance to the disease.

These were purely opportunistic schemes. Methodical development of pathogens and potent biological toxins as weapons of mass destruction had to wait until the development of modern medical theory and the discovery of pathogens, in the last part of the 19th century.

Despite the fact that the knowledge to manufacture biological weapons or "bioweapons" was available in the First World War, there is no strong evidence that anyone did, although rumors of biological warfare (BW) were widespread at the time. The possibility of BW was certainly evident, and the Geneva Protocol of 1925 included clauses forbidding it. Development of bioweapons did not actually begin in earnest until the 1930s, with Japan taking the lead. The effort was directed by a single domineering figure, an Imperial Japanese Army officer and medical doctor named Shirou Ishii.

Ishii returned from a European tour in 1932, bringing with him a conviction that BW was the way of the future. Ironically, the fact that the Geneva Protocol had banned BW helped draw his attention to it, since the ban implied that people found such weapons unusually dangerous and frightening.

The Japanese invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1932, and set it up as the Japanese puppet state of "Manchukuo". In 1935, Ishii managed to convince his superiors of the potential usefulness of BW, and so they set him up in a hospital in Harbin, Manchuria, to conduct small-scale experiments with dangerous pathogens. By 1937, Ishii's work had proved promising enough for the Japanese War Ministry to approve the construction of a full-scale BW research and development complex, at a small town named Pingfan, about 65 kilometers (40 miles) south of Harbin.

The Imperial Japanese Army had attacked China proper in that year. The Japanese were able to win almost every battle they fought, but they were completely outnumbered by the numerous Chinese. The Japanese turned to BW as a potential equalizer. It is also possible that they hoped to exterminate Chinese in areas Japan intended to colonize.

The Pingfan Institute was completed in 1939. Ishii, now a general, was in charge of the research organization, which was given the cover designation "Water Purification Unit 731". The Pingfan complex covered over three square kilometers (1.16 square miles) and included an airfield, barracks, and laboratories.

Japanese recruits arriving there found it an odd place. For example, none of the vehicles carried any identifying marks. They quickly found out that it had other strange and much more unpleasant features. One Japanese veteran who was a technician at the Pingfan site recalled there were many doctors and professors there, giving it something of the air of a university medical research facility, but noted that it was in fact the opposite: "Here, they were trying to find ways to kill people."

There was a certain scientific challenge in this effort. The understanding of pathogens and their actions in causing disease and epidemics was crude, and there was, and is, still much to learn. There were also the practical problems of developing bioweapons, such as selecting the appropriate pathogen, determining the lethal dosage, and engineering the right techniques for production, storage, transport, and dispersal. Unit 731 also worked on defensive measures, primarily the large-scale production of vaccines.

Unit 731 studied almost every major known pathogen for its utility as a BW agent or "bioagent". Some of the more significant included:

* "Anthrax", a highly lethal disease of livestock and humans. Anthrax is a bacterial infection that can be acquired by contact with infected victims, eating of tainted meat, or by inhalation of anthrax spores. When anthrax is acquired by contact, it can create hideous sores that may lead to death by blood poisoning, though the mortality is relatively low, no more than about 20%. The sores tend to be shiny black with dried blood, which gives the disease its name, since the word "anthracis" is Greek for "coal".

Mortality is about 50% if the bacteria is ingested by eating tainted meat, though this form of anthrax is very rare. However, when inhaled, it leads to a lung infection that is over 90% lethal, killing in a few days.

The action of inhalation anthrax is dangerously deceptive, since the victim suffers an initial bout of what feels like the flu, which then seems to fade out. In fact, all that has happened is that the anthrax spores have been scavenged up by the body's lymphatic system, where they then proceed to multiply, bringing on a second and murderous bout of the disease. The bacteria actually kill by secreting a deadly toxin that results in toxic shock. The purified toxin itself can be in principle used as a deadly bioagent.

The only good thing about anthrax is that it is not contagious as such, though since a victim's corpse is full of spores, cremation is usually advisable. The lack of contagiousness is actually an advantage when using it for BW. In fact, anthrax would become the lethal bioagent of choice for future BW development programs. Its spores are very hardy and easy to store for long periods of time, and can be conveniently packed into munitions. Anthrax spores are so hardy, in fact, that they will persist in an area over which they have been spread for decades, though they are somewhat sensitive to bright sunlight.

* "Plague", the "Black Death" of Medieval times, is caused by infection from a bacterium named Yersinia Pestis. It has three forms: "bubonic plague", when spread by fleas or other parasites; "pneumonic plague", when spread by inhaling the bacteria; and "septicemic plague", when spread by contact.

Pneumonic plague has a lethality of 95% or more. Although bubonic plague is somewhat less lethal, its spreads more easily and is more useful for BW. However, bubonic plague still isn't all that good a bioagent, as it requires cultivation, storage, and distribution of live fleas.

* "Gas gangrene", a condition caused by the infection of wounds by the Clostridium perfringens bacterium, characterized by stinking putrefaction of the flesh.

* "Brucellosis", a bacterial disease caused by various pathogens of the genus Brucella that infects livestock and humans. It is not very lethal, but it is highly contagious and can incapacitate a victim for a week or more.

* "Tularemia", a bacterial disease caused by the bacterium Francisella tularensis that infects rabbits as well as humans, and so is known as "rabbit fever". Like brucellosis, tularemia is rarely fatal in humans but can make a victim wretchedly sick for a time.

* "Glanders", a disease of horses and humans that eats away the mucous linings of nose and respiratory tract, and attacks the lymphatic system. It is caused by the bacterium Pseudomonas mallei. It is uncertain if the Japanese were interested in glanders for killing horses and mules, or humans, or, most likely, both.

* Bacteria related to food poisoning, including the Salmonella and Clostridium botulinum bacteria, which secrete extremely deadly biotoxins. The toxins were potential bioagents in themselves, particularly botulism toxin. The lethal dose of botulism toxin is very small, and the toxin is easily produced in quantity and stored for long periods of time.

Other pathogens investigated included typhus, typhoid, cholera, tetanus, smallpox, and tuberculosis, but these agents proved difficult to "weaponize". The Japanese also experimented with exotic biotoxins, such as blowfish poison. They were traditionally familiar with this toxin, since blowfish is regarded as a delicacy in Japan but has to be prepared by a specially-qualified chef so that it may be eaten without fatal results.

Incidentally, as with chemical agents and chemical weapons, a "bioagent" only refers to a pathogen or toxin itself, while a "bioweapon" was a delivery system loaded with bioagents.

* The Japanese had to produce pathogens in quantity for tests and, if they proved worthy, production. Unit 731 researchers devised a scheme using trays of meat and broth as cultures. The trays were kept in incubators and the scum of bacteria produced was skimmed off every few days. The stink of rotten meat was almost overpowering. Eventually, Pingfan was believed to have been capable of producing tonnes of pathogens every month.

Having obtained pathogens, the next step was to determine their effectiveness. There were plenty of Chinese available for use as involuntary test subjects. The Japanese would put up posters warning the Chinese that epidemics of the appropriate diseases had broken out, and then a squad of soldiers would go out and dump pathogens discreetly into the well of a village. Three or four days later, they would return to inspect the ill. The soldiers would anesthetize them, cut them open and take samples, and sew them back up again. "Then we threw the bodies down the well," as a veteran of the program recalled. The soldiers torched the village and left.

The tests were very successful. General Ishii then decided to perform more controlled tests in deep secrecy on Chinese prisoners taken to the compound at Pingfan. Many of these people were simply rounded up off the streets of Harbin to meet quotas set by Unit 731 officers. At least 3,000 were taken there, and few, if any, ever came back. Another cover story for the compound was that it was a lumberyard, and so Unit 731 personnel referred to the prisoners as "maruta (logs)". Prisoners were assigned serial numbers 1 through 200. Once that block had all been killed, the serial number count started over again through the next 200, and so on. Japanese veterans of Unit 731 recollect the place as a kind of hell on Earth, but the Imperial Japanese Army demanded unhesitating obedience. Soldiers were routinely struck by their NCOs, and insubordination of any sort was unthinkable, meriting immediate and severe punishment.

Chinese prisoners were tied to poles out in the open and forced to look into the sky as airplanes flew over and sprayed bacteria on them. The prisoners were carefully observed and their condition recorded with colored drawings as they sickened and died. Others were tied to stakes or panels and arranged around fragmentation bombs containing Clostridium perfringens bacteria. The bomb was detonated, and the test subjects were studied as they developed gas gangrene from their wounds. When test subjects died, their corpses were burned in a crematorium.

* By 1940, Unit 731 had developed a ceramic anthrax bomb and built 4,000 of them. They were also considering ways of delivering bubonic plague. Researchers at Pingfan bred plague-infested rats in quantity and then gathered the fleas from the rats. The fleas could then be distributed as a bioagent vector, using tubular baskets strapped to the bomb pylons of aircraft.

In October 1940, a Japanese aircraft flew low over the city of Ningpo, which was still held by the Nationalist Chinese, and dispersed a spray containing plague-infested fleas. The results were appalling. Roughly 500 people died and the city was panic-stricken. One survivor recalled: "There were so many people and not enough coffins. So two people would share a coffin." It is thought that more attacks may have taken place in China, but records of such activities were destroyed by the Japanese at the end of the war and nobody knows for sure.

The researchers at Unit 731 went on to even more imaginative BW studies. They decided to use Chinese prisoners not merely to test pathogens, but to actually act as production incubators to breed them. The researchers believed that pathogens that managed to overcome the body's defenses were likely more virulent. The prisoners were injected with pathogens. When the victims reached their limit, the prisoners were chloroformed and all the blood was drained from their bodies. When the blood flow from a prisoner slowed down, a soldier would jump on the man's chest to force out the last drops. One Japanese veteran recollected: "They did not leave even one drop of blood in the body!"

With such extensive handling of pathogens there were likely to be accidents, and it is believed that hundreds of Japanese staff of Unit 731 died from the pathogens they handled. Despite this problem, Ishii's BW research empire spread, establishing 18 satellite stations in China and in other locations ranging from Hokkaido to the Dutch East Indies.

The Japanese BW researchers not only investigated pathogens to attack people, they also studied chemical herbicides and pathogens to destroy crops. The most intensively studied plant pathogens were "fungal smuts" and "nematode worms" intended to attack Soviet and North American wheat fields. Smuts in particular were potentially highly effective bioagents. The head of a wheat plant infected by wheat smut turns into a blackened mass of spores that are released into the air to infect other wheat plants downwind. The Japanese developed a production facility that could yield about 90 kilograms (200 pounds) of smuts annually.

BACK_TO_TOP

[3.2] 1942-1945: BW DEVELOPMENT IN THE WEST

* By mid-1942, word of Japanese BW development was leaking out to the Allies, and in July 1942 Winston Churchill placed the issue on the top level of priority for discussion by Allied leadership. It was not completely a new topic to him, since the British had been thinking about BW since 1934. The prime mover was a Whitehall bureaucrat named Sir Maurice Hankey, who, like Shirou Ishii, had been inspired to investigate BW by the fact that the Geneva Protocol tried to ban it.

In the prewar period, British BW efforts were minimal, consisting of a few committees issuing reports and, as war approached, funding for limited defensive measures. When war broke out in 1939, considerations for offensive biowarfare rose in importance, and the British government established a small laboratory at Porton Down, run by a medical researcher named Paul Fildes.

Fildes began to conduct small-scale experiments to evaluate pathogens and biotoxins for use as bioagents, and in late 1941 recommended the production of millions of anthrax-laced linseed cattle cakes that would be dropped by air over Germany. The goal was to destroy German livestock, not kill German civilians, though obviously some civilians would contract anthrax by eating tainted meat. Production of the cattle cakes was approved, and a large stockpile of them was stored at Porton Down until the end of the war, when they were all incinerated.

Biotoxins had a particular appeal for clandestine operations in occupied Europe, setting a precedent for later interest by intelligence services in such agents. Porton Down is known to have produced botulism toxin under the designation "BTX", and although the records are unclear, a BTX-laced grenade may have been used to assassinate SS General Reinhard Heydrich, a senior and highly competent Nazi officer, considered a possible heir to Hitler's throne, who was then the ruler of occupied Czechoslovakia.

The intelligence information leaking out about Japanese BW experiments only increased the priority of Allied efforts to build their own BW capability. In the summer of 1942, the British conducted their first large-scale BW experiment on Gruinard Island, off the coast of Scotland. A film was made of the experiment and remained classified until 1997. Sheep were taken to an open field, secured in wooden frames, and exposed to a bomb that scattered anthrax spores. The sheep started dying three days later. They were examined and then burned. Other tests involved dropping anthrax bombs from a Vickers Wellington bomber.

Safety precautions were slipshod and it is a wonder that there were not calamities among the personnel involved or innocent bystanders. One worker in the program recalled helping a medical researcher pour a thick soup of anthrax agent into a bomb, without use of protective clothing or any other safety measures. Despite attempts to disinfect Gruinard Island, the anthrax spores left there by the experiments kept the island in quarantine for five decades.

The final report on the Gruinard Island experiments suggested that anthrax could be used to render whole cities uninhabitable "for generations". Biological weapons were potentially orders of magnitude more effective than chemical weapons.

* In the meantime, the British had been working with the Canadian government to set up a BW test range at Suffield, in the province of Alberta. The area was empty and isolated, and experiments could be performed with greater safety than any location available in the British Isles.

The entry of America into the war in late 1941 added more momentum to the Allied BW effort. The US had considered BW, and government reports had been written and distributed to detail defensive and offensive measures. With a real war on, the American Chemical Warfare Service, with British assistance, built up BW research facilities, including test stations near Dugway and near Pascagoula, Mississippi; a potential production facility at Vigo, near Terra Haute, Indiana; and the master research and development center at Camp Dietrich, Maryland.

The British work on anthrax, or "N" as it was codenamed, as a bioagent led in 1943 to the design of an "N" bomb suitable for mass production by the Americans. This munition weighed 1.8 kilograms (4 pounds). 106 of these "bomblets" were to be packed into a 225 kilogram (500 pound) cluster-bomb canister and dropped over enemy population centers.

The whole effort was protected by the highest level of secrecy, TOP SECRET:GUARD, which the Americans described jokingly as DESTROY BEFORE READING. An initial pilot batch of 5,000 N bombs was produced at Camp Dietrich in May 1944, and medium-scale production at a rate of about 50,000 bomblets a month followed. The bomblets were turned over to the British, who stockpiled them.

The plant at Vigo, Indiana, was designed for production of 500,000 anthrax bombs per month. The plant was never put into operation, partly because of extreme safety concerns. By the end of the war, it had been converted to antibiotic production, though it could have easily been converted back to bioagent manufacture if the need had arisen.

* The drastic nature of anthrax was not lost on the Americans, and so they searched for a bioagent that could incapacitate instead of kill. They found brucellosis a promising agent. The infectious dose was much smaller than that of anthrax, meaning a single bomber could attack a much larger area with the same weight of bombs, and a city that had been attacked with brucellosis would be safe to enter a week or so after the attack. Brucellosis was, on the other hand, wildly infectious, and many of the people who worked with it in the weapons development program came down with it. However, other than a few days of nasty chills, pains, fever, and headaches, it rarely did much harm. Brucellosis weapons were in an advanced state of development at the end of the war.

The Americans also investigated anti-crop bioagents, including "potato blights" and "wheat rusts"; "sclerotium rot", which can attack soybeans, sugar beets, sweet potatoes, and cotton; and "blast diseases" to attack rice. There is some suspicion that crop bioagents might have been used by the Allies. In the fall of 1944, the German potato crop was infested by a huge plague of Colorado beetles, and in 1945 the Japanese rice crop was badly afflicted by rice blast. However, in the absence of any evidence supporting such suspicions, there is no reason to believe these incidents were due to anything but natural causes.

BACK_TO_TOP

[3.3] 1928-1945: BW DEVELOPMENT IN THE USSR

* The Soviet BW program during World War II remains somewhat mysterious, and considering the fact that many records were destroyed later, will probably always remain so.

Ken Alibek (originally Kanatjan Alibekov), a senior official of the Soviet "Biopreparat" BW organization in the late 1980s and early 1990s, emigrated to the United States in 1992 and provided a history of the Soviet BW program. While Soviet expatriates have been known to tell exaggerated stories for self-serving reasons, Alibek's comments sound entirely plausible.

According to Alibek, the Soviet BW effort began in 1928, three years after the USSR signed the Geneva Procotols. The initial focus was to "weaponize" typhus, with the work supervised by the state security apparatus, the "GPU", which would eventually evolve into the KGB. The effort then expanded, with new facilities built in the network of GPU prison camps. The prime testing ground was at Solovetsky Island, in the Arctic, north of Leningrad in the White Sea.

Prisoners may have been used in tests of bioagents. Certainly there were many casualties among researchers and workers as well, whose lives were made even more miserable during the purges of the 1930s by the influence of Trofim Lysenko, a quack biologist who managed to get Stalin's ear. Those biologists who differed with Lysenko were sent to prison camps or worse, and Lysenko did much to hobble the Soviet BW effort.

When the Soviet Union was invaded by Hitler's forces in the summer of 1941, BW facilities in the west were relocated by train to the east, in the Ural mountains. A train carrying pathogens and other materials was passing though the city of Gorky when the Germans decided to bomb the place, panicking supervisors on the train, who ordered the train to keep on rolling through the city. The town of Kirov became the main BW facility after the move. The Soviets also found a new testing ground, at Rebirth Island in the Aral Sea.

During the summer of 1942, when the Germans were pushing through the USSR towards the Caucasus and Stalingrad, there was an outbreak of tularemia of unprecedented magnitude among both German and Soviet troops. Alibek felt certain the outbreak had been a BW attack that had gone wrong, and "old-timers" in the Biopreparat organization told him stories that reinforced his suspicions.

There was also an outbreak of "Q fever" among German troops on leave in the Crimea in 1943. Alibek never investigated the matter in detail, but believed it might very well have been a BW attack or test. Q fever was originally "Query fever" because nobody could figure out what caused it. The pathogen was eventually identified as Coxiella burnetii, a species of "rickettsiae", a type of very small and primitive bacteria that, like viruses, can only reproduce in living cells. The typhus pathogen is another member of the rickettsiae.

Q fever is a disease of sheep, goats, and cows carried by ticks. Animals can be infected by breathing dried tick feces, and humans in proximity to the animals can be infected as well. It forms hardy spores, with an effective dose as small as one spore, and so makes a fairly good bioagent. Q fever causes a sudden fever, aches, and general ill health, but it is much less dangerous than its relative typhus. Q fever only lasts a few weeks, rarely leads to complications except for pneumonia, and is rarely fatal.

Outbreaks of Q fever were unheard of in the Soviet Union before that time, and it was heavily investigated as a bioagent by Soviet researchers later. However, wars do tend to be accompanied by a breakdown in public health systems and outbreaks of diseases, sometimes unusual ones, so the evidence remains inconclusive.

"BIONOIA" Part 4

Dengue in Cuba, West Nile in New York:
When Mosquitoes Come Home to Roost

by Mark Sanborne

In previous installments in this series, we discussed the wartime use of infected fleas and lice to spread plague (definitely by Japan in China and maybe by the US in Korea), and the possibility that the pandemic of tick-borne Lyme disease was a result of secret biowar research at Plum Island, NY. But there's another bug that has vectored its way into the history of biological warfare, and it's one that almost everyone on the planet is intimately familiar with: the hated mosquito.

The US biowar establishment, it turns out, has long been interested in using the blood-sucking insects as vectors to transmit diseases to designated human populations. A particular favorite is the dime-sized Aedes aegypti mosquito, which has the talent of infecting people with potentially deadly yellow and dengue fevers. In fact, there is unnerving evidence that the US sought to conduct mosquito vector tests on unwitting foreign subjects, and that it may have used the knowledge it gained in such "experiments" to launch a stealthy mass attack on a civilian population, with far-reaching though little-recognized consequences.

A disturbing but fascinating article, "US Attempted to Test Biowarfare in Haryana," appeared in an Indian newspaper, the Deccan Herald, on Nov. 5, 2002. It is worth quoting in its entirety:

Admission by the United States that it released Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in a Pacific island in 1965 as part of its biological warfare test programme has vindicated the Indian government's decision to close down a similar US-sponsored mosquito project in India in the early 1970s, scientists say.

Indian scientists who had worked on the project say the latest revelation has convinced them that they were unwittingly helping the US biowarfare research under the cover of a public health programme to control malaria. NP Gupta, former director of the National Institute of Virology, told PTI that the then prime minister Indira Gandhi "acted correctly" and at the right time by ordering closure of the project before the planned massive release of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in 1975 at Sonepat, Haryana. The Sonepat project aimed at finding out the range and survival of these mosquitoes and how they dispersed and penetrated homes and other places once release from the centre of town.

Three weeks ago, the US Defense Department de-classified documents listing as many as 46 secret biological and chemical weapons tests conducted at the height of the Cold War. In one such trial, codenamed Magic Sword, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that transmit yellow and dengue fevers were released off the coast of Baker Island [in the Pacific] to obtain information on mosquito biting habits, mosquito trap technology and operational and logistical problems associated with the delivery of mosquitoes to remote sites.

Mr. PK Rajagopalan, a senior medical entomologist who was on the staff, said the Sonepat project had identical aims (as the one conducted in Baker Island) except that that it was planned on a very large scale using hundreds of thousands of mosquitoes reared at a special facility in New Delhi built with funds from the US Public Health Service routed through the World Health Organization (WHO).

Prior to its closure, the US project in India drew media criticism and a parliamentary committee probe was conducted due its preoccupation with the Aedes aegypti species that causes yellow fever, a disease which does not exist in India.

Apparently the U.S interest in development of yellow fever as a biological warfare weapon was sustained even after President Nixon supposedly ended the biological warfare program in 1970, says Gupta. Only this time the trial was conducted outside the United States in a developing country under the umbrella of the WHO, he says. Rajagopalan is also surprised at the different standards employed by the US. Baker Island was unpopulated and remote from the mainland, the trial used informed volunteers and the mosquitoes were eradicated after the trial was over. No such plans existed for the proposed release in Sonepat, whose entire population of half a million was to become unwilling volunteers while the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) was in the dark about the real intention behind the release experiment, said Rajagopalan, who retired from an ICMR institute.

Colathur Golpalan, who was ICMR director general at that time, said the US project was permitted by his predecessor and he was not responsible. It was I who saw to the closure of the project, he said in a telephone interview.

Ms. Indira Gandhi stopped the trial and ordered the project closed on the advice of an expert committee despite mild protests from WHO and denial by the US State Department that the project had anything to do with biological warfare. But according to Gupta, the latest revelation that the Baker Island release was indeed a biological warfare experiment vindicates the closure of the US project in India.

Aside from the breathtaking audacity of the US subterfuge, the Sonepat project also provides further evidence for critics who claim that the WHO and other UN and international (as well as domestic) agencies have long been (and still are) stocked with "experts" who cooperate closely with the US military-intelligence complex. Such cozy covert relationships raise the possibility that Washington may have succeeded in hoodwinking other developing countries into actually allowing mosquito vector tests on their territory under the guise of malaria control. Declassified Cold War documents also indicate that US Army biowarriors at Fort Detrick, MD, conducted A. aegypti release experiments at military bases in Florida and Georgia in the late 1950s, and that war planners had determined that mosquito-transmitted yellow fever, a mostly tropical disease, could be a suitable bioweapon to employ in southern parts of the Soviet Union.

But if, as suggested, such vector tests actually did lead to a stealthy mass attack on a civilian population, where might that have occurred? Round up the usual suspect: Yes, Cuba.

CUBA AND DENGUE: MADE IN THE USA?

As noted in Part 2 of this series, from the 1960s onward Cuba appears to have been on the receiving end of an unremitting barrage of biological attacks hatched in the U.S. and carried out by anti-Castro terroristsand even directly by State Department spray planes flying over Cuban territory. The list of targets is impressive in its Nazi-like thoroughness: sugar, tobacco, pigs, cattle, coffee, citrus, dairy cows, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, beans and other vegetables, bananas, and honey bees, to name more than a few.

Of course, some of the outbreaks may have occurred naturally, and it's often difficult to conclusively prove one way or the otherthat's one of the great advantages of biowarfare. But many of the incidents involved infections, parasites, and blights never before seen in Cuba, and sometimes were firsts for the Western Hemisphere. And they weren't all aimed at plants and animalswe also noted the outbreak of hemorrhagic dengue fever in 1981 that infected over 340,000 Cubans and killed 158, most of them children. The vector for the disease: that uncomplaining workhorse, A. aegypti.

"We share the people's conviction and strongly suspect that the plagues that have been punishing our country, especially the hemorrhagic dengue, could have been introduced into Cuba, into our country, by the CIA," Fidel Castro declared in a July 26, 1981, speech celebrating the Cuban revolution, during which he dealt at length with the public record of US biowar efforts and attacks. "We urge the United States government to define its policy in this field, to say whether the CIA will or will not be authorized againor has this already been authorized?to organize attacks against leaders of the revolution and to use plagues against our plants, our animals, and our people."

The State Department responded that charges of Washington's involvement in the dengue outbreak were "totally without foundation... The Cuban revolution is a failure, and it is obviously easier to blame external forces than to admit those failures." But whatever one may think of the Cuban revolution, the fact remains that the health care system it created prevented the hemorrhagic dengue pandemic from turning into a complete catastrophe, as it likely would have in almost any other Latin American country.

"In 1981, we faced the gravest health situation ever to have confronted our country, with tens of thousands of persons hospitalized, and over 10,000 in shock and bleeding," a Cuban health official told a Havana trial hearing evidence about the US role in the outbreak, held in July 2003 as part of Cuba's compensation claim against the United States.

Due to the disease's high mortality rate, medical authorities expected a minimum of 3,000 fatalities in the first few weeks, yet Cuba's model responsecombined with what one pediatrician called "collective thinking"kept the death toll remarkably low. (In fact, Cuba's effective approach to the dengue outbreak was subsequently adopted by the Pan American Health Organization.)

So, aside from means, motive, and opportunity, what else indicates the US may have been behind the outbreak? Let's start with the fact that it was the first major epidemic of hemorrhagic dengue in the Americas in nearly a century. Then there are the odd particulars: the epidemic began with the discovery of simultaneous clusters of infections in three widely separated parts of Cuba (Cienfuegos, Camaguey, and Havana) that then spread like wildfire, and none of the initial victims had recently been away from home or been in contact with international travelers who might have carried the disease and transmitted it to the local mosquito population.

Oh, and how about a confession? In 1984, Eduardo Arocena, head of the Omega-7 terrorist group, on trial in the US for the murder of a Cuban UN diplomat, affirmed that his groupand he personallyhad introduced "germs" into Cuba, including dengue, as part of the US biowar against Castro. (He was convicted of the murder, and revealed as an FBI informant, leading to the collapse of his group.) Previous reports had indicated Cuban terrorists also smuggled the African swine flu virus into the country in the late 1970s, forcing the slaughter of all of the island's pigs.

Cuban counter-revolutionaries are known for their braggadocio, even in court, and in the case of the 1981 dengue pandemic it's unclear how they could have smuggled the thousands of pre-infected A. aegypti mosquitoes into Cuba that would have been necessary to spark the outbreak. (How many mosquitoes can be crammed into a large suitcase or packing crateor even a diplomatic pouch?)

Dengue is an arbovirus (i.e. transmissable only by insects) and cannot be transmitted between humanseach victim requires their own mosquito bite. Though one insect can infect multiple victims, it's likely that, based on the number of Cuban afflicted, several hundred thousand mosquitoes would have had to be released to achieve the desired effect, putting the scale of the operation suspiciously in line with that of the aborted Sonepat test project. For that reason, it seems more likely that the mosquitoes were somehow dispersed from the air, dropped like covert paratroopers behind enemy linesand indeed, the locations of the three initial outbreaks were all close by international air corridors.

THE LAW OF UNINTENDED (?) CONSEQUENCES

According to the Centers for Disease Control, dengue (pronounced "DEN-ghee") "is the most important mosquito-borne viral disease affecting humans; its global distribution is comparable to that of malaria, and an estimated 2.5 billion people live in areas at risk for epidemic transmission." Tens of millions of people are infected with dengue fever (DF) annually. However, while debilitating and terribly painful (it's not known as "break-bone fever" for nothing), DF infection is relatively short-lived and fatalities are rare. But each year sees several hundred thousand cases of the more virulent dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF), leading to tens of thousands of deaths among those who develop the related dengue shock syndrome (DSS)a mortality rate of about five percent in most of the world, though it can be much higher in more undeveloped areas.

And here's where it gets even more interesting, and frightening. There are four types of DF (DEN-1, 2, 3, and 4), and getting one type does not give the victim immunity from contracting the other types. In fact, it is known that contracting one version after having earlier been infected with another can make the victim particularly prone to developing the much more dangerous DHF/DSS.

Following World War II, mass spraying of insecticides targeted against A. aegypti succeeded in eliminating most major DF epidemics in the Western Hemisphere, though the spray campaign waned in the 1970s due to environmental concerns. By 1970, only DEN-2 was present in the Americas. Suddenly, in 1977two years after the Sonepat project was cancelledDEN-1 appeared in Jamaica (where another U.S. bete noire, the socialist Michael Manley, was in power) and then Cuba, the first major dengue outbreak in the country since 1944. Though it was a milder version that didn't lead to DHF and caused no deaths, it was widespread and helped lay the epidemiological groundwork for a subsequent hemorrhagic outbreak. (A 1978 serologic survey indicated that 45% of the Cuban population had been infected with DEN-1, whereas before 1977 only 2.6% had antibodies for the virus. That's quick work.)

Then in 1981, a "new" strain of DEN-2 exploded onto the scene in Cuba, and this one, insidiously piggy-backing on the 1977 pandemic, did lead to a mass hemorrhagic outbreak of DHF and DSS, the first in the hemisphere since the turn of the century. The CDC says the deadly new strain was from Southeast Asia, where the disease is endemic and is the leading cause of hospitalization and death among children. But Cuban and other researchers are more specific: they say it is identical to one known only from a 1944 outbreak in New Guinea. In which case, the odds of such an obscure strain suddenly appearing in multiple places in Cuba by "natural" causes seem slim indeed.

(There were reports that the all of the personnel at the US Navy base at Guantanamo were vaccinated against dengue prior to the 1981 outbreak and thus were not infected. While the medical literature notes that currently there is still no publicly available vaccine against dengue, a Google search also indicates that a modern vaccine was first produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and GlaxoSmithKline Biologicalsand the Pentagon has never been shy about giving its troops experimental drugs, as it did with anthrax vaccine in the first Gulf War.)

In the years following 1981, Cuba launched a rigorous program of A. aegypti eradication, vector control, and medical surveillance to keep dengue in check, though there were further smaller outbreaks in Santiago de Cuba in 1997 and Havana in 2001-2 that were contained with limited casualties. (While there is no evidence that the origins of these particular epidemics were suspicious, some have speculated that they may been designed to hurt Cuba's growing foreign tourism industry.)

Meanwhile, in the years following the 1981 outbreak, the virulent strain of "imported" DEN-2 that caused it proceeded to metastasize rapidly throughout the Caribbean to Mexico and Central and South America. By 2003, 24 countries in the Americas had reported confirmed cases of hemorrhagic dengue where it was previously unknown, and potentially deadly DHF is now endemic in many of these countries. (The U.S. itself gets an estimated 100 imported cases of dengue a year.) If, as the evidence strongly suggests, both the 1977 and 1981 Cuban pandemics were spawned in Washingtonor more specifically, Fort Detrick, MDthen the resultant devastating effects on the hemisphere as a whole are staggering to contemplate. It would represent state bioterrorism on an almost unimaginable scale.

Is this an example of the law of unintended consequences? One can only hope they were unintended, though it's hard to see how they could not have been foreseen. Evidently, for those in a position to know, the "gain" was deemed to be worth the risk.

THE ARRIVAL OF WEST NILE

Which leads us to our last stop on Bionia's skeeter hit parade. Remember the West Nile virus, way back in those halcyon pre-9-11 days of 1999? It made a particularly big impression on those of us who live in the New York City metropolitan region, where the disease made its first appearance in the Western Hemisphere in August of that year. Lucky us.

The first case of human infection occurred in Queens on Aug. 2. By the end of the year, there were a total of 62 cases and seven deaths in the region from the mosquito-borne illness, most of them older people with compromised immune systems. More alarming for many was the initial "cure" imposed by the administration of Mayor Rudolf Giuliani: mass spraying of the insecticide malathion, a likely carcinogen. This writer was among the many who had to dodge inside to escape swooping, spraying helicopters in Brooklyn and Queens, while some residents walking the late-night streets of Manhattan were actually hosed in the face with the poison from passing trucks.

West Nile is a member of the genus flavivirus, along with our new friends dengue and yellow fever, though WN is much less of a global health threat. About 80% of those who contract West Nile show no symptoms and are unaware they are infected, while others display mild, flu-like symptoms. In the few worse cases it can lead to deadly encephalitis and meningitis, and in fact its initial appearance was misdiagnosed as St. Louis encephalitis.

Transmitted by mosquitoes and other vectors, particularly birds, WN has since spread quickly across the country, and by 2003, 45 states and the District of Columbia had reported human cases. By 2005, a total of 19,625 cases and 882 deaths were reported by the CDC, considerably less than the annual toll from the common flu. (However, the number of those infected but undiagnosed or without symptoms probably numbers in the hundreds of thousands.) More alarmingly, while direct human-to-human transmission was initially ruled out, in 2002 it was discovered that the virus could be transmitted through donated blood, organ transplants, breast milk, prenatal exposure, and occupational exposure.

Another spooky attribute of WN is its propensity to kill birds, its most common host. An unusual number of dead birds, particularly crows, were evident around the tri-state area for a while before they were connected to the West Nile outbreak. The virus was first discovered in 1937 in Uganda, and the African variety does not affect bird or animal hosts. Other mild outbreaks occurred in Israel in the 1950s the South Africa in the 1970s, but beginning in the mid-1990s a string of more serious epidemics occurred in North Africa, Israel, Italy, Russia, and Romania that included large die-offs of local bird populations. This seems odd, because it's generally not in the evolutionary interest of a virus to kill off its main host that gets it from place to place.

Was this creepy entourage of dead crows some sort of designer harbinger for the end of the millenium? (Perhaps an engineered Avian flu will be the Antichrist.) Is it evidence, as some observers have suggested, that the viruswhich has long been held in government labs here and around the worldwas modified genetically as part of some shadowy biowar project?

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

Our last installment dealt at length with the questionable history of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, located off the North Fork of eastern Long Island, particularly in regard to its possible propagation of tick-borne Lyme disease. Considerable evidence was cited from a 2004 book, Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory, by Michael Carr, who also weighed in on the West Nile question. He wrote that Plum Island researchers were already studying the WN virus at the time of the outbreak (officials deny this), and cites the death of 18 horses in eastern Suffolk County near Plum Island in August 1999 as evidence that the North Fork was the epicenter of the epidemic.

The official story is to blame international air travel, as if that's something new. It's suggested that a WN-infected traveler (yet another Patient Zero) from the Middle East arrived in New York and was bitten by a local mosquito or two, who then went on a major feeding binge and spread the disease to both birds and humans far and wide. Or perhaps a few infected mosquitoes somehow hitched a ride to New York on a jet and wreaked havoc when they escaped into the environment. Or maybe an infected bird was imported or somehow made its way across the ocean. But questions of geography persist: How could such sole-source vectors initially manage to infect both horses at one end of Long Island and humans at the other end, in Queens, but very few people in between? (Though later Suffolk County did develop one of highest rates of West Nile, as it did with Lyme disease in the 1970s.) Just as in the case of the simultaneous appearance of dengue in three widely separated parts of Cuba, here is a hint of the hand of man, not nature.

Or maybe it was just an "accident." If Plum Island (i.e. the US underground biowar complex) was somehow the source of the West Nile outbreak and/or Lyme disease, were the releases somehow inadvertent, or were they in fact something far more sinisterthat is, stealthy mass attacks on domestic civilian populations? Again, considering the apparent US role in spreading a deadly version of dengue fever in the Western Hemisphere, it's hard to give "them" the benefit of the doubt.

In fact, the idea that the arrival of West Nile was a potential bioterrorist event was knocked around quite a bit by media pundits early on in the outbreak, though the short list of official suspects should not surprise anyone. In a recent web search for "West Nile and biological warfare," these were the first four stories that came up: "West Nile VirusIs Castro's Bioterrorism Threat Being Ignored?"; "Castro Weaponizes West Nile Virus"; "Iraq and Cuba - Fitting Pieces in the West Nile Puzzle?"; and "West Nile Virus: Part of Hussein's Planvia Cuba?" This US intelligence disinformation campaign, spread by NewsMax and several right-wing Cuban-American web sites, while predictable, is at least as fanciful as a story on the CDC's web site positing that Alexander the Great may have died of West Nile virus encephalitis.

Some accounts at the time did take note of the embarrassing fact that the CDC had provided samples of West Nile and a host of other potential biowar agents to Saddam Hussein's then-friendly regime in the mid-1980s. While the strain delivered to Iraq was different than the one that turned up in New York, NewsMax declared that "experts have confirmed that Saddam has the ability to mutate viruses and other biological agents." (Sounds like he's one of the X-Men.)

But it wasn't only right-wingers who weighed in on the subject. In the October 11, 1999 edition of The New Yorker, Richard Preston wrote a lengthy story headlined "West Nile Mystery: How Did It Get Here? The CIA Would Like to Know." It cited the concerns of unnamed intelligence analysts, and referred to an excerpt of a book entitled In the Shadow of Saddam published in the April 6, 1999, Daily Mail, a London tabloid. The author, who called himself Mikhael Ramadan, purported to be have been one of Saddam's body doubles before he escaped from Iraq, and claimed his boss bragged to him in 1997 that Iraq had developed a strain of WN that was "capable of destroying 97% of all life in an urban environment."

Preston acknowledged that the claims "sounded crazy," but went on to suggest that there might be at least a germ of truth behind the story, displaying only slightly more skepticism than the American press later did in the trumpeting of Iraq's nonexistent WMD threat during the run-up to the 2003 invasion. So here's a final suggestion for all those official experts out there: Next time an incidence of possible bioterrorism pops up on the media's radar, try to avoid the usual projection of guilt upon the empire's victims, and instead take a look in the mirror.

RESOURCES:

Granma International on Cuban Dengue outbreak
http://www.granma.cu/cubademanda/ingles/demanda13-i.html

CDC official history of dengue (note: read between the lines)
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/dengue/

Medical Service Corp. International hisotry of dengue
http://www.mscionline.com/projects/diseases/dengue.htm

West Nile Mystery, by Richard Preston, The New Yorker, Oct. 18 & 25, 1999
http://www.newsmakingnews.com/artwestnilenewyorker.htm

CDC on Alexander the Great and West Nile Virus
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol9no12/03-0288.htm

From our weblog:

"Desert Storm vets demand Rumsfeld resignation," Oct. 21, 2002
http://ww4report.com/static/56.html..iraq15

"Is Baghdad next?" Oct. 20, 2001
http://ww4report.com/static/4.html..shadows2

See also:

"Bionoia," Pt. 3, WW4 REPORT ..121
http://ww4report.com/node/1898

"BIONOIA" Part 3

The Mystery of Plum Island: Nazis, Ticks and Weapons of Mass Infection

by Mark Sanborne

In Part 2 of this series, which ran in our February issue, journalist and researcher Mark Sanborne looked back at how the US, which now hypes the threat of "bio-terrorism" to justify gutting the Biological Weapons Convention, has actually spearheaded the development of biological weaponsand their use against civilian populations. In this new installment, Sanborne explores the possibility that unusual outbreaks of exotic diseases within the United States have been linked to the Pentagon's bio-warfare experimentsincluding some overseen by former Nazis. The closing installments will explore the survival of the secretive Cold War biowar apparatus in both the US and Russia, and its links to the new wave of biological threats.

If covert elements of the U.S. government have indeed been bombarding Cuba for over four decades with diseases aimed primarily at animals and crops, as discussed in Part 2 of this series, where might such bioagents have been developed? One likely suspect is Plum Island, the site where, during the early years of the Cold War, germs and viruses that could be used to wipe out Soviet livestock were cultivated.

Located less than two miles off the North Fork of Long Island and only six miles from Connecticut, the 840-acre Plum Island Animal Disease Center was established after World War II. Initially run by the Army, the facility was put under nominal control of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in the 1950s.

The PIADC was dubbed "the safest lab in the world" and tasked with studying diseases that could threaten the nation's livestockwhich it did, effectively. But from the beginning Plum Island also played a key role in the U.S. biowarfare program and shared close ties with Fort Detrick, MD, the Army's biowar HQ.

This long-suspected nexus was confirmed in Cold War records declassified in 1993. According to the documents, when calling for a major biowarfare test in the early 1950s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated: "Steps should be taken to make certain adequate facilities are available, including those at Fort Detrick, Dugway Proving Ground [Utah], Fort Terry [Plum Island] and an island testing area." ("Plum Island's shadowy past: Once-secret documents reveal lab's mission was germ warfare," Newsday, Nov. 21, 1993.)

"In many cases there were only maybe five people who knew what was going on in weapons research [at Plum Island]. People in one lab didn't know what happened in the next lab, and they didn't ask," said Norman Covert, the aptly named base historian at Fort Detrick.

AGAIN WITH THE NAZIS?

And just to make it officially nefarious: it turns out Plum Island has Nazi connections. Former U.S. Justice Department prosecutor and Nazi-hunter John Loftus wrote his 1982 book The Belarus Secret: "Even more disturbing are the records of the Nazi germ warfare scientists who came to America. They experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases. I have received some information suggesting that the U.S. tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during the early 1950s... Most of the germ warfare records have been shredded, but there is a top secret U.S. document confirming that 'clandestine attacks on crops and animals' took place at this time."

More recently, other details emerged in Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory by Long Island lawyer Michael Christopher Carroll, who spent six years researching the topic. His explosive book actually prompted a lengthy article in the New York Times ("Heaping More Dirt on Plum Island," Feb. 15, 2004). Though meant as a debunkingaside from Carroll, all seven people interviewed were critics or skepticsin the Times' perverse tradition, a lot of interesting information was revealed to its mainstream readers. But not all of the establishment took the party line: Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo endorsed the book as "brilliant" and a "carefully researched, chilling expose of potential catastrophe."

Most of the controversy centered around Carroll's informed speculation that Plum Island may have been the source of a series of epidemics over the decades: outbreaks of Dutch duck plague that almost wiped out Long Island's duck industry in the 1960s, the insidious appearance and spread of Lyme disease in the 1970s and 1980s, a mystery infection that killed most of the Long Island Sound's lobsters in 1999, and in the same year the arrival of West Nile virus in the New York metropolitan area, which claimed a number of lives and prompted authorities to repeatedly spray the city with malathion. Allaying potential public fears over such verboten ideas was a main reason the Times devoted so many inches of newsprint to damage control; the article mentioned the Nazi angle only in passing.

It turns out that the spiritual godfather of Plum Island was one Dr. Erich Traub, a Nazi scientist with a fascinating history, according to Carroll's well-documented account. He spent the pre-war years in a scientific fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton, N.J., studying bacteriology and virology, while still finding time to hang out at Camp Sigfried, headquarters of the American Nazi movement in Yaphank, Long Island, 30 miles west of Plum Island. He then took his laboratory skills back to Germany where he eventually became chief of Insel Riems, the Nazi's secret biological warfare lab located on an island in the Baltic, supervising the testing of germ and viral sprays over occupied Russia, targeting cattle and reindeer, while reporting directly to Heinrich Himmler.

After the war Traub worked briefly for the Soviets before escaping into the embrace of Operation Paperclip, Washington's covert employment program for useful Nazi scientists. As Werner von Braun was to rockets, Traub was to germs: He promptly went to work for the Naval Medical Research Institute and gave operational advice to the CIA and the biowarriors at Fort Detrick. Indeed, his detailed description of his work at Insel Riems probably helped inspire the selection of Plum Island by the Army: both the German and U.S. facilities were situated on islands where the prevailing winds blew (mostly) out to sea.

VECTOR ANALYSIS

Despite his exceedingly questionable history, Dr. Traub in fact was twice asked to be director of Plum Island, including by the USDA. He declined, but was known to have paid at least several official visits there. He may very well have been one of the Nazi scientists cited by Loftus who supervised the dropping of infected ticks from planes. Which brings us to the question of vectors.

In the context of biowarfare and infectious disease generally, a vector is an organism or agent that carries pathogens from one host to another. To attack an enemy's agriculture system, such intermediary vectors aren't always needed: It's often enough to covertly disperse a pathogen directly on part of a crop and allow the infection to spread from plant to plant, as anti-Castro agents apparently did in Cuba on a number of occasions. (The versatile U.S. attack reportedly has also employed molds, fungi, insect infestations, and other minute pests targeted at specific cropsall of which, of course, had to be grown and tested somewhere first.)

However, it's not quite so simple to attack animal and human populations, which are not stationary targets. Effective aerial delivery of agents like anthrax or rabbit fever can be affected by wind and weather, and is more likely to be detected as a deliberate attack. (Though if it's sprayed on an army of protestors on the Washington Mall, a possibility discussed in Part 1 well, that's apparently another story.)

On the other hand, employing such vectors as mosquitoes, fleas, lice, and ticks to transmit diseases to targeted populations, while much slower in effect, can spread a greater variety of infections much more widely while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability for the attacker. Thus we should not be surprised that the fruits of Nazi and Imperial Japanese research and development in this ugly field ended up in eager U.S. hands after the war.

RETURN TO CUBA

Which bring us to this: Carroll cites an internal 1978 USDA document titled "African Swine Fever" obtained from an investigation by former Long Island congressman Thomas Downey. It notes that in research at Plum Island 1975 and 1976, "the adult stages of Abylomma americanum and Abylomma cajunense were found to be incapable of harboring and transmitting African swine fever virus." Translated, that means scientists had tested the Lone Star tick and the Cayenne tick as effective vectors for African swine flu and found them wanting.

A vector is generally thought to be a one-way affair. But while this particular vector test failed, it also seems to point, paradoxically, in two directions at once. One is back, once again, to Cuba. Note that Plum Island's research on suitable vectors for African swine fever took place midway between unusual outbreaks of that disease in Cuba, in 1971 and 1979-80, as discussed in Part 2. (And recall that its appearance in Cuba was a first in the Western hemisphere.)

Perhaps the U.S. scientists were innocuously testing potential vectors that could spread the exotic flu to America's pork industry. Or perhapsconsidering Plum Island's longstanding connections to Fort Detrickthe tests were actually designed to find a new vector to transmit the virus once again to Cuba, which coincidentally did suffer another outbreak a few years later. In any event, whatever vector infected Cuba's pigs with African swine fever in 1971 and 1979, it's safe to say it wasn't the Lone Star or Cayenne ticks.

But is that the end of the infected tick story? Unfortunately, no. Because the failed Plum Island vector test also points in another possible direction, right back into the heart of what our political-warrior class now likes to call the Homeland. And rather than riding off ineffectually into the sunset, the Lone Star tick has gone on to a key supporting role in yet another biomystery.

THE PANDEMIC THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

In 1975, a strange disease broke out in Old Lyme, Connecticut, just 10 miles across Long Island Sound from Plum Island. Often initially characterized by a red rash and swollen joints, it afflicted an original cluster of 50 victims, many of them children, who were at first misdiagnosed as having juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.

It turns out that "Lyme disease"as it came to be called as cases mounted and spread in the years that followedis a devious, multi-systemic, inflammatory syndrome that mimics other illnesses by encompassing a range of afflictions, including chronic and crippling pain and fatigue that untreated can spread to organs and the central nervous system, causing depression, palsy, memory loss, psychosis, and even encephalitis and death.

Such severe outcomes might surprise many Americans, most of whom have heard of Lyme disease but because of the current lack of media attention probably think it's no big dealunless they know someone who suffers from it. Well guess what? With a quarter century behind the outbreak, Lyme is now the most common vector-borne infection in the United States, and the most common tick-born illness in the world. Yes, you heard that right.

After spreading out from "ground zero" in the Long Island Sound area, as of mid-April 2006, a total of 267,779 domestic cases of Lyme in 49 states had been reported to the federal Centers for Disease Control. Some experts estimate that, due to Lyme's confusing multiple manifestations, at most only one in 10 cases are recognized and reported to the CDC, so that the total number of victims could be more than 2.68 million. On top of that, a study predicts a one-third increase in the number of cases per year in the U.S. over the 10-year period from 2002 to 2012.

A TICK WITH A HISTORY

So what's going on? Where did this weird bugwhich, leaving aside its suspicious proximity to Plum Island, seemed to emerge from nowheresupposedly come from? Its history is intriguing. In 1982, National Institutes of Health researcher Dr. Willy Burgdorfer isolated and identified spirochetes (a form of bacteria) of the genus Borrelia from the gut of infected Ixodes scapularis (commonly known as deer ticks) as the etiological agent of Lyme disease. It was dubbed Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb), and the good doctor ruefully said of his discovery: "It's a helluva bug, and I'm sorry my name is on it!"

However, while Burgdorfer was the first to isolate the insidious spirochete (which animal studies suggest in some cases can worm its way deep inside tendons, muscle, the heart and the brain inside a week), earlier incarnations of the disease had been studied in Europe since the late 19th century. By the 1930s, it was known to cause neurological and psychiatric problems and the tiny Ixodes tick was suggested as a vector. By mid-century doctors were using new antibiotic treatments with some success.

But while the disease caused by the Bb bacteria was known in Europe, it did not appear to constitute a major health problem. It was even less of an issue on the other side of the Atlantic: Although Bb and related bacterial strains are thought to have long been present in North America, the only official case reported in the U.S. before the Connecticut outbreak occurred in Wisconsin in 1970, when a hunter became infected from a tick bite.

So what changed in the 1970s to kick-start what has since become a pandemic, both here and in Europe? (Though the P-word is never used in reference to Lyme, as opposed to bird flu, which is still only a potential pandemic.) Or are we to believe that Bb has been infecting people all along but somehow it just wasn't being noticed? A similar argument has been advanced by apologists for the medical-industrial complex who maintain that the recent explosion of autism was simply the result of better detection and recognition of the condition, rather than being largely caused by mercury-laced vaccines, as many now suspect.

THE INVADERS

Dr. Alan G. Barbour, who worked closely with Burgdorfer in the identification of Bb, co-wrote an article with Durland Fish in 1993 that made an interesting case for how the modern outbreak of Lyme disease may have occurred. They suggested that Bb infections were a fact of life in early American history that went largely unnoticed amid the harshness of frontier life:

"The generally benign nature [!] of acute B. burgdorferi infection relative to the debilitating and fatal effects of diseases plaguing North Americans through the 19th century may have contributed to its obscurity until a cluster of cases of childhood arthritis first brought it to wider attention on this continent. The ecological changes in the northeastern and midwestern United States during this century are responsible for the recent emergence of Lyme disease as a public health problem."

They argue that mass deforestation of the Northeast due to the clearing of land for agriculture and settlement in the 19th and early 20th century resulted in a collapse of white-tailed deer populations, the primary carriers of the I. scapularis tick, and hence the tick itself became too scarce to infect people with Bb. The authors further theorize that Long Island served as a refuge for relict populations of deer in the area. Then, as land-use patterns changed in the latter half of the 20th century, woodlands and forests recovered in the Northeast, along with deer and deer ticks:

"The invasion by I. scapularis of the increasingly reforested mainland from island refuges initiated the current epidemic of Lyme disease in the Northeast There is evidence that several independent mainland invasions [mainly from Long Island] by I. scapularis took place, resulting in early Lyme disease foci in central New Jersey, mainland Westchester County, N.Y., southeastern Connecticut, and eastern Massachusetts."

So science seems clear on the fact that Long Island was the source of the modern outbreak of Lyme disease, but the devil is in the details. The key problem with Barbour and Fish's scenario is that it treats pre-1975 Long Island like some kind of lost world, an offshore wilderness Eden where remnant deer lived free of human interaction. In fact, the island's deer population, concentrated in eastern Suffolk County, has long lived close by people, many of whom were certainly exposed to deer tick bites over the years. So why were there no reports of the disease on Long Island in the decades before the outbreak in Connecticut? And why, in the wake of that outbreak across the Sound, did Suffolk Countyhome of Plum Islandquickly develop one of the highest rates of Lyme disease in the country?

This writer grew up in western Suffolk County in the 1960s and '70s, and spent plenty of time exploring the woods, and was bitten by plenty of ticks. But they were the types of tick you can easily see and feel crawling on your skin, and thus usually could be picked off before they began engorging themselves in earnest on one's blood. Fortunately, there were no deer or deer ticks in my neck of the woods. So it came as quite a shock to learn in the late '70s of the sudden existence, just a few dozen miles to the east, of infected ticks that were almost invisibleliterally the size of a pinheadand had the ability to make an unlucky hiker's life into a living hell. Our tiny friend I. Scapularis is indeed the perfect covert agent: it does its dirty work quickly and disappears before you know it's there, usually leaving behind a telltale rash and a very questionable prognosis.

WOUND, DON'T KILL

Okay, enough beating around the real and metaphorical bushes. Is there any actual evidence that Lyme disease could be the outcome of biological warfare research at Plum Island that, either accidentally or otherwise, escaped into the outside world? In fact, the evidence seems quite suggestive, especially when compared to the shaky logic of the official story.

Some might ask: Why would biowarriors be interested in studying a disease agent like Borrelia burgdorferi that incapacitates but rarely kills its victims? Actually, for all the attention focused on deadly pathogens like anthrax, plague, and rabbit fever, the biowar establishments of various powers have also long been interested in agents that can slowly stricken and debilitate a civilian population.

The logic is brutally simple: just as a wounded soldier puts more logistical strain on an army than a dead one does, gradually sickening a population places greater economic and social stress on a society than simply killing a limited number of people with a more direct and virulent attack. If the disease agent can be transmitted via a "natural" vector like ticks or mosquitoes, providing plausible deniability, and can confuse medical authorities by presenting a broad array of symptoms that mimic other conditions (Bb, like its more famous relative syphilis, has been called the "Great Imitator"), then so much the better.

Imperial Japan's infamous Unit 731 biowar outfit, discussed in Part 2, reportedly conducted experiments with the Borelia genus, the results of which likely fell into U.S. hands after the war. However, there is no documentary evidence that indicates Plum Island researchers ever worked with Bb after all, it is primarily a disease of humans, not animals. On the other hand, if the bacteria were being secretly studied (or worse, "weaponized") at the lab and introduced to ticks for vector tests, there are any number of ways tick-borne Bb could have escaped to the mainland: from deerwhich are able to swim to and from the islandto birds, or even an inadvertently infected lab worker. (Assuming, of course, it wasn't released on purpose as part of some sinister test.)

Since the Lyme outbreak, scientists claim to have documented the presence of Bb in I. scapularis museum specimens collected in the late 1940s from Shelter Island and other parts of Long Island close by Plum Island. This is presumed to be evidence that the spirochete was pre-existing in the area and was not "engineered" in a lab in the 1970s. But note that the period the tick specimens were collected is suspiciously close to the time when Nazi scientists may have "experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases" at Plum Island.

GIVING NATURE A HAND

The question then arises: Are the unusual characteristics of Bb solely the result of natural evolutionary processes, or were they helped along by the hand of man? Speaking more generally, here's what Col. Oliver Fellowes, a founding father of Plum Island who was transferred from Fort Detrick in 1952, had to say: "We were always looking for a way to camouflage a strain so that it would be so difficult to detect and identify that, by the time the enemy had done so, the disease would have done the damage." (Unit 731 by Peter Williams and David Wallace, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1989.)

Wait, it gets better. On July 1, 1969, Dr. Donald MacArthur, director of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, testified before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. He had this exchange with Rep. Robert Sikes of Florida:

DR. MACARTHUR: There are two things about the biological agent field I would like to mention. One is the possibility of technology surprise. Molecular biology is a field that is advancing very rapidly and eminent biologists believe that within a period of five to 10 years it would be possible to produce a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired.

REP. SIKES: Are we doing any work in that field?

DR. MACARTHUR: We are not.

REP. SIKES: Why not? Lack of money or lack of interest?

DR. MACARTHUR: Certainly not lack of interest.

MacArthur's chilling testimony can be seen as the Rosetta Stone of bionoia, and will be discussed in greater detail in a later installment. But we don't need it for confirmation that something like Lyme disease can be considered a biological warfare agentwe have it straight from the source, namely the U.S. government. On Nov. 15, 2005, the Associated Press reported:

"A new research lab for bioterrorism opened Monday at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The $10.6 million Margaret Batts Tobin Laboratory Building will provide a 22,000-square-foot facility to study such diseases as anthrax, tularemia, cholera, lyme disease, desert valley fever and other parasitic and fungal diseases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified these diseases as potential bioterrorism agents."

That, it would seem, makes it official. Among those who took note of this matter-of-fact admission was Dr. Virginia Sherr, who, in a letter to the editor published Nov. 22, 2005 in the online edition of the Lancet medical journal, wrote:

"[The] concern is the overriding significance of an invisibilized but nonetheless serious infection caused by an extraordinarily complex neurotropic spirochete. Its pandemic is approaching severity that was experienced throughout the world in the Spanish Flu of 1918. The causative spirochete is, of course, less immediately fatal than was the virus of that epidemic, but it is deadly, nonetheless, to the human brain. The fact that the causative spirochete, B. burgdorferi, is being studied as an agent of biowarfare in the USA adds impetus to a need for quick education of most of the world's academic physicians as to what has been sensed at the clinical level for a long time: we are dealing here with a formidable 'smart stealth' type of bacteria that is hard to eradicateone that does extreme damage to psyche and soma if not treated aggressively over the long term when missed in the first days following inoculation by the vector... Organized Medicine has mostly ignored or deserted the field of neuro-Lyme's currently immense proportions, internationally."

THE REVENGE OF TEXAS

Whither Plum Island? According an Aug. 28, 2005, story in Newsday, "Plum Island's Future Up In The Air," the federal government plans to replace the existing facility on the island with a more secure one or relocate to a higher-security level research lab elsewhere by 2011. "The Plum Island facility was built in the 1950s and is nearing the end of its life cycle," according to the Deptartment of Homeland Security. Glad to hear those guys are on the case.

Ah, but what about the Lone Star tick and its failed vector test back in 1975? Aside from that curious coincidence with Cuba, the documented research also appears to have something to say about events much closer to home. It demonstrates that Plum Island researchers were infecting Abylomma americanum with various bioagents to see if they could be successfully vectored to other species. (In this case pigs, but swine are often used as stand-ins for humans in medical experiments.)

That is a matter of some interest because, while the I. Scapularis deer tick is the major vector for Lyme disease in the Northeast, the Lone Star tick has also been found to be a carrier of spirochetes. There is some debate about whether A. americanum can transmit Bb to humans. Researchers say the tick carries a slightly different bacteria that they've dubbed Borrelia lonestari, which may or may not cause a "new" Lyme-related ailment called Masters disease, identified in 1991 in Missouri.

The fact that two different ticks carry their own versions of an unusual spirochete bio-agent is suspicious enoughdesigner bugs, perhaps? (Check out this unintentional smoking gun in Barbour and Fishs article: "The presence of spirochetes similar to B. burgdorferi in A. americanum in areas where competent vectors are absent is inexplicable.") But here's the real kicker: The Lone Star is a warm-weather tick that is prevalent in the Southeast and until recently was mostly unknown in the colder Northeast. Now it has reached as far north asyou guessed itLong Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut. (Though perhaps the word should not be "reached" but "released.")

A. americanum now makes up 5% of the overall tick population in the region, though there are greater concentrations in some areas than others. (Researchers combing the woods in New Jersey have found 2,000 to 3,000 Lone Star ticks within one hour.) When did these little devils start being noticed up here in large numbers? Yup: In the wake of the outbreak of Lyme diseasethough there are reports that the initial invaders may have "arrived" as far back as the 1950s, just as things were getting underway at Plum Island.

And yes, Abylomma americanum, as it's nickname suggests, has a special association with the Lone Star State. Another import from Texas that the rest of the country probably could have done without.

RESOURCES:

Lyme Disease Foundation
http://www.lyme.org/

"The Biological and Social Phenomenon of Lyme Disease," Barbour and Fish, Association for the Advancement of Science, June 1993
http://info.med.yale.edu/eph/vectorbio/fish/BarbourFish.pdf

Dr. Donald MacArthur, Congressional testimony, July 1, 1969
http://panindigan.tripod.com/aidsdodhear.html

"BIONOIA" Part 2

The Nuts, Bolts and Crimes of Biological Warfare

by Mark Sanborne

In Part 1 of this series, which ran in our December issue, journalist and researcher Mark Sanborne noted how the media-fueled fear of microbeswith waves of "bionoia" over anthrax, SARS and now bird fluhas been used as a new justification for the national security state, even as the Bush administration has sought to erode the Biological Weapons Convention. This month, we take a look back at how the US has actually spearheaded the development of biological weaponsand their use against civilian populations. Part 3, to come next month, will explore the survival of the secretive Cold War biowar apparatus in both the US and Russia, and its links to the new wave of biological threats.

BIO-WARFARE: A BRIEF HISTORY

Bionoia may be a new concept, but biowarfare certainly is not. In its crudest form, it can be traced as far back as Neanderthal man, who rubbed feces on his spear points to add infection to his prey's wounds, while in the sixth century BC, Assyrians poisoned enemy wells with rye ergot, an hallucinogenic. Most famously, Tartars in 1346 catapulted bubonic-plague infected corpses into an Italian trade settlement in Crimea, which possibly helped jump-start the Black Death pandemic that eventually killed a third of Europe. And in our own backyard, first British and later American agents pushed the process of genocide along by deliberately spreading smallpox among Native Americans

In the early 20th century, major European powers began seriously dabbling in biological warfare research. While it wasn't used on the battlefields of World War I, there is evidence that German agents infected horses and cattle in the U.S. with glanders disease before they were shipped to France, though this fascinating escapade had no appreciable effect on the war effort.

By the start of World War II, the U.S. was the only major power not to have a biowar program, though Germany, Britain, and the USSR were wary of using such weapons due to the threat of retaliation in kind. By 1942, the British were testing anthrax weapons at the 520-acre Gruinard Island off northern Scotland, which became so contaminated with deadly spores that it was quarantined for nearly half a century. That same year, pushed to the wall by the Nazi blitzkrieg, the Soviets reportedly made effective use of Tularemia against the Germans near Stalingrad, though the disease spread to Russian soldiers and civilians as well. Washington finally decided to catch up when confronted with the German threat, and more importantly because of Japan's massive biowar campaign in China, which began with its invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s.

The infamous Unit 731, led by radical nationalist Shiro Ishii, developed plague weapons that may have killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese throughout the war, and conducted Mengele-like experiments that killed thousands of prisoners of war, including some Americans. Despite that grisly record, after the war U.S. authorities granted freedom to Ishii and all his cohorts who shared their research data. (The USSR convicted and executed those Japanese biowar researchers it got its hands on, as their weapons had reportedly been used against Soviet troops when they invaded Manchuria in 1945.)

Meanwhile, some of Ishii's now-respectable associates went on to found pharmaceutical companies in Japan. (Shades of the "reformed" Nazi industrialists in Germany.) His successor as Unit 731's commander in the final months of the war, Masaji Kitano, founded the Green Cross blood products firm, and even published postwar research articles based on Unit 731's experimentsbut called the subjects monkeys rather than humans.

The U.S. promptly moved on from coddling war criminals to launching its own biowar program in earnest in the post-war period, endeavoring to catch up to the capabilities of the Russians. Fort Detrick in Frederick, MD, became the headquarters of Pentagon's effort under a command that was later dubbed the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Other key facilities included the Dugway Proving Grounds test center in Utah and the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas.

In the "golden years" of the 1950s and '60s, these secret facilities churned out tons yes, tonsof "weaponized" anthrax, botulinum toxin, and our new friend Tularemia (rabbit fever), meaning they could be effectively delivered to our enemies by bombs, missiles, artillery, drone spray-planes, or other means. Plans were also developed to hurt the Soviet economy by killing horses, cattle and swine with germs and viruses cultivated at the secretive Plum Island installation off the north coast of Long Island, N.Y.

TESTING, TESTING...

Even more ominous is the evidence that has since emerged of widespread testing of biowar agents or supposedly safe facsimiles on unsuspecting U.S. citizens. (As in the case of the extensive radiological experiments performed on Americans during this same period, the facts were only admitted by the government many years after the events.) In one of the few cases of semi-informed consent, code-named "Project Whitecoat," Fort Detrick scientists exposed some 2,700 Seventh-Day Adventist volunteers to a variety of infectious agents between 1954 and 1973, though allegedly no one died in the experiments.

There was also a huge airborne test of deadly bio-agents (probably anthrax) near Johnston Atoll in the Pacific in 1968 involving a fleet of Navy ships stocked with Rhesus monkeys, over half of which died. Though shifting winds may have exposed some sailors to toxins, the exercise convinced skeptical U.S. planners that bio-weapons could be delivered effectively against enemy troops.

Numerous other tests in the 1950s and '60s targeted both unknowing service members and civilians for mock attack on a mass scale. The most famous was the dousing of New York City's subway system in 1966 with Bacillus globigii, or BG, an allegedly noninfectious stand-in for anthrax, to study dispersal patterns. (The bacteria was contained in light bulbs that were dropped onto train tracks in midtown Manhattan.) However, it turns out that BG can infect people with weakened immune systems. Though no casualties were documented in the New York case, it's not clear that anyone at the time would have noticed a slight increase in unknown infections among the elderly, infants, and immune-compromised adults.

BG, Bacillus subtilis, Serratia Marcescens, E. Coli, and other potentially dangerous live bacteria were also loosed upon a variety of other targets: Washington's National Airport and Greyhound bus station, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and military bases in Key West, California, Virginia, and Hawaii. And way back in 1950, a Navy ship used giant hoses to spray a germ cocktail over the San Francisco Bay area, creating a big enough cloud to theoretically deliver 5,000 "safe" particles into the lungs of each of the city's 800,000 residents. Eleven cases of pneumonia and one death were linked to the test, which one Wall Street Journal account in 2001 dubbed "the bacterial fogging of San Francisco." That simulated attack and many others included the addition of fluorescent particles of zinc-cadmium-sulfidea substance now known to be carcinogenicto better track the dispersal of the germ cloud.

CUBA: BIOWAR'S GROUND ZERO

All of which begs the question: If that's how our government treated its own citizens, what did it do to its enemies? It's largely forgotten today, but during the Korean War, China and North Korea accused the U.S. of engaging in large-scale field-testing of bio-weapons against military and civilian targets. These efforts allegedly included bombs filled with plague-infected fleas, a trick the Americans learned about from their friends in Unit 731. Though the case is "officially" unproven, there is considerable scholarly evidence for the claims. (See The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea by Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, Indiana University Press.)

But the real ground zero for the U.S. use of bio-weapons is Cuba. As early as 1961-62, as part of the CIA's notorious and wide-ranging "Operation Mongoose" terror campaign, anti-Castro agents used bio and chemical agents to poison cane fields, sickening field workers and contaminating Cuba's sugar exports. A decade later, in 1971, the island was infected with African swine flu (the first such outbreak in the Western Hemisphere), forcing Cuban authorities to slaughter all of the country's half-million pigs and depriving it of a staple source of protein. A Newsday report of Jan. 10, 1977 indicated the virus was transported to Cuba from the U.S. base at Fort Gulick, Panama. Swine flu reappeared in 1979-80, and another 300,000 pigs were slaughtered.

Emboldened by such "successes," anti-Castro Cuban terrorists and their U.S. handlers in 1981 apparently introduced a virulent strain of hemorrhagic dengue fever into the island, infecting over a quarter of a million people and killing 158, including 101 children. (Just prior to the outbreak, according to some reports, all personnel at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay were fortuitously vaccinated against dengue.) A 1982 article in espionage-watchdog magazine Covert Action pointed to Fort Detrick's experiments with dengue fever and the Aedes aegypti mosquito that spreads it, and noted that Cuba was the only country infected.

Over the next 15 years, there were unrelenting outbreaks of exotic and previously unknown diseases that targeted everything from sugar and tobacco to citrus, coffee, egg, and dairy production. In 1990-91, just as Cuba was launching programs to export bananas and honey, both sectors were hit with debilitating infections.

In April 1997, Cuba became the first state party of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) to request an investigation of an alleged biowar attack. It claimed that on October 26, 1996, a single-engine U.S. State Department plane en route from Patrick Air Force Base in Florida was seen releasing an unknown substance over Matanzas province. Shortly thereafter, on December 18, the Thrips palmi insect parasite made its first appearance in Cuba - in Matanzas. A group of 12 BWC state parties discussed the Cuban claim, but found the evidence insufficient.

OPERATION "MARSHALL PLAN"

The obvious should be noted: These acts of state bio-terrorism persisted over four decades through alternating Democratic and Republican administrations, continuing up to Clinton. But even all that pales next to what was contemplated if the U.S. had invaded Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis.

The magnanimously named "Operation Marshall Plan" called for Havana to be blanketed with a cocktail of Venezuelan equine encephalitis and Q fever that would kill "only" 1 to 2 percent of those exposed. "Teams at Pine Bluff made thousands of gallons of the cocktail, enough to fill a swimming pool," the now-infamous New York Times reporter Judith Miller wrote in her 2001 book "Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War." The director of Fort Detrick argued that the plan would cut down on combat casualties and thus had "a humane aspect." Even if the low-ball fatality percentage was accurate, the attack would have killed between 70,000 and 140,000 Cuban civilians.

Since all of this not-so-secret history seems to remain a secret to official Washington, the corporate media exhibits no sense of painful irony when the Bush regime and its think-tank allies regularly accuse Cuba of being a biowar threat. In May 2002, John Bolton made a speech entitled "Beyond the Axis of Evil" charging that Cuba has "at least a limited offensive biological weapons research and development effort" and had "provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states." That same month, back on more familiar disinformational territory, Judith Miller, a friend of Bolton's, wrote in the N.Y. Times that "administration officials" believed "Cuba has been experimenting with anthrax."

The biotechnology that Cuba most evidently shares with the impoverished nations of the world are such things as hepatitis B and meningitis vaccines developed by its world-class pharmaceutical industry. Of course, the country has had plenty of practice defending itself against diseasesthough we are meant to ignore the fact that many of them are apparently made in the U.S.A.

Next Month: Anthrax, SARS, bird flu, monkey pox and the new bionoia

RESOURCES:

"Years Ago, the Military Sprayed Germs on US Cities," Wall Street Journal, Oct. 22, 2001
www.mindfully.org/Reform/Military-Germs-US-Cities.htm

"Decades of US Biowarfare Against Cuba," The Internationalist, May 2003
www.internationalist.org/biowarfareagainstcuba0503.html

"Cuba Making Bio-Arms?" WW4 REPORT ..34
http://ww4report.com/34.html..latinamerica1

"'Axis of Evil' Expands," WW4 REPORT ..39
http://ww4report.com/39.html..who'snext3

"BIONOIA"

Did U.S. Use Germ Warfare Against DC Peace March?
Or Are We Just Being Bionoid...?

by Mark Sanborne

"Bionoia... Catch It!"

There's something uniquely scary about germs. Along with making us sick, they're the things that put the "B" in ABC (Atomic, Biological, and Chemical) warfare. Sure, there's been some stiff competition on the fear-o-meter: Cheney warning that a WMD attack on a U.S. city was inevitable, ongoing chatter about dirty bombs, a government report that an attack on chemical plants in New Jersey could send a "lung-melting" cloud over New York, killing over a million. Still, the prospect of lab-bred bacteria and viruses causing mass indiscriminate sickness and death holds a special horrid fascination for many people.

This is not surprising. Fortunately, exposure to atomic blast, radiation, and poison gas are hypotheticals for most of us, but we all have personal experience fighting infections and disease, and our species has a long genetic and cultural memory of such ills. And unlike the relatively site-specific nature of nuke and chemical attacks, biological pandemicsbe they man-made or "natural"have the potential to spread their devastation across the country and globe in a matter of weeks or months.

With the latest "regular" flu season and its attendant vaccine shortages upon us, and the specter of deadly bird flu suddenly being trumpeted by the media-medical establishment, it's no wonder that public paranoia has been whipped up. These fears follow a well-worn groove dating back decades: AIDS, of course, and the emergence of other frightening "hot zone" diseases like the Ebola and Marburg viruses from the jungles of Africa, and their potential dissemination via globalization and worldwide air travel: the "revenge of nature" scenario. Domestically, there have also been "outbreaks" like Lyme's and Legionnaire's disease, West Nile virus, and more recently SARS, which supposedly was spawned in the unsanitary condition of China's exotic cuisine market. Then there's the talk of flesh-eating bacteria in our hospitals and other scary diseases-of-the-week.

Fear of "bioterrorism" has been a parallel track running in the public consciousness. For decades there have been warnings from "experts" about the looming threat of biowarfare attacks by terrorists, a menace that became the staple of countless mass-market books, TV shows, and Hollywood thrillers. But who, exactly, are the "bioterrorists?"

A common motifand still a current favoriteinvolves terrorists buying black-market plague weapons from disaffected and/or mercenary ex-Soviet or Third World scientists. (Of course, the main real-life example of this trade was the transfer of U.S. bio-agents to Iraq in the 1980s.) This cliched script point found a real-life echo in reports from Afghanistan, after the U.S. invasion in 2001, of documents in a supposed al-Qaeda safe house indicating elaborate if not fantastical plans for aerial anthrax attacks against unnamed targets.

That presumably is the kind of bioterrorism that we're supposed to fear, and for which billions of new homeland-security dollars are currently being spent. But it also raises what should be an obvious question: if the Russians and certain Third World dictators have dangerous biowar programswhat about the U.S.?

TREATY DODGING

Many Americans, sadly, would probably be surprised to discover that the U.S. does indeed have a very robust biological warfare capability, despite the fact that President Nixon ordered a halt to the U.S. biowar program in 1969 and signed the 1972 International Biological Weapons Convention banning their production and use. The BWC was ratified by the Senate in 1974 and to date has been ratified by 143 other nations. Unfortunately the landmark treaty had no enforcement protocol whereby suspicious sites could be inspected, and the U.S. has endeavored mightily ever since to keep it that way.

Most recently, the task fell to that most belligerent of necons, John R. Bolton, who was shoehorned into his U.N. ambassadorship in an Aug. 1 recess appointment by Bush. (The appointment technically lasts until a new Congress convenes in January 2007.) Back in December 2001, when he was undersecretary of state for arms control and international security (!), Bolton single-handedly scuttled an international conference in Geneva aimed at finally implementing a BWC enforcement protocol, saying it was "dead is not going to be resurrected."

The U.S. was the only signatory to object to the protocol, claiming countries like Iraq and Iran were cheaters, and that inspections could reveal biowar trade secrets of the U.S. military and its partners in the private sectorresearch with potentially huge commercial value in the pharmaceutical and vaccine industries. Presumably, the fear is that international inspection teams could be infiltrated by foreign intelligence agentsas the U.S. and Britain did in the case of Iraq from the 1990s up until the recent war.

But the larger reason for Washington's adamant if lonely opposition may have more to do with the treaty's other fatal loophole: the "defensive" research exception. The convention's signatories pledge not to develop, produce, stockpile, or acquire biological agents or toxins "of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective, and other peaceful purposes." Unfortunately, that has been interpreted as allowing countries to continue developing ever-more-deadly pathogens, as long as it's done in small amounts and only for the purpose of developing countermeasures, like drugs and vaccines.

That exception allowed the U.S. and othersprincipally Britain and the Sovietsto continue business as usual by labeling their biowar programs as now being defensive in nature. The U.S. junked its germ stockpiles from the early Cold War period and launched a new generation of biowar research, using cutting-edge advances in recombinant DNA to devise new versions of already virulent diseases. Over the years more and more of that work has been farmed out to spooky "defense" contractors like Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) and the Battelle Memorial Institute. Never mind international inspectors, it's not clear that anyoneand certainly not Congressis overseeing this sprawling bio-industrial complex to ensure it's in compliance with international treaty and domestic law.

Here is a vast underground empire, hiding in various government and private labs around the country, sucking up billions of dollars in secret funding, dedicated to creating the very things we fear most, and marred with a long, well-documented history of covert biowar experiments on U.S. citizens and attacks on foreign enemies. Yet those facts and that history are verboten in polite media discourse; instead the talking heads work overtime to keep our post-9-11 fears focused on "terrorists" and "rogue states."

Thus various commentators have had no difficulty speculating that North Korea may be "weaponizing" avian flu for sale to al-Qaeda, that SARS might have been a bioengineered virus that escaped from a Chinese weapons lab, or that the introduction of West Nile virus into the U.S. in 1999 was a dirty trick from Saddam. But it's apparently impossible for our intelligentsia to conceive the possibility that "rogue elements" (whatever that means in today's context) in the U.S. biowarfare community could be responsible for those or other such horrors, whether by clumsy accident or nefarious design. Except, of course, for the 2001 anthrax attacks, which is perhaps why that highly suspicious case has dropped down the memory hole.

But maybe I'm just being...bionoid.

RABBIT FEVER GOES TO WASHINGTON

Or am I? On Sept. 24, 2005, I joined at least 100,000 other people from across the country on the National Mall in Washington D.C. to protest the Iraq war. It didn't get much press, but here's something that got even less: on Sept. 30, the federal Centers for Disease Control warned public health authorities that a low concentration of the Francisella tularensis bacteria that causes Tularemiacommonly known as rabbit feverhad been detected by six different bioweapons sensors around Washington that day.

The sensors, run by the Department of Homeland Security's Bio Watch program, are designed to detect six bio-agents deemed by the government most likely to be used as biological weapons. The little-known rabbit fever is one of them; it takes only 10 of the microscopic bacteria to cause Tularemia, which if left untreated can kill 50% of those infected. (The other favorites include anthrax, smallpox, and plague.) DHS waited three days before informing the CDC, which took another three days to do its own tests before sending out a low-profile alert.

"It is alarming that health officials...were only notified six days after the bacteria was first detected," House Government Reform chairman Tom Davis (R-VA) wrote in an Oct. 3 letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. "Have DHS and CDC analysts been able to determine if the pathogen detected was naturally occurring or the result of a terrorist attack?"

"There is no known nexus to terror or criminal behavior," a DHS spokesman told the Washington Post. "We believe this to be environmental." A CDC spokesman concurred, saying: "It is not unreasonable that this is a natural occurrence. There are still no cases of Tularemia."

There are two problems with this bizarrely placid official reaction. One, there are indeed people who say they came down with unknown infections shortly after returning from the protest, though there is as yet no proof that rabbit fever was the culprit. A number of personal accounts of sickness by named individuals were cited on the ProgressiveSociety.com blog for Oct. 8 and on Salon.com Oct. 18.

One person wrote on Progressive Society: "Hi, I wanted to let people know that many people got sick after the march, including myself. Initially, it seemed like the flu, but wasn't responding to flu treatment. Then I thought to switch to a treatment for bacteria infection, and then started to feel a little better... The incubation time for this bacteria is 3 to 24 days. There are people who came with me from Southern states who are just getting sick now."

Salon cited four people who said they got sick after attending the anti-war rally. One was Mike Phelps, 45, who traveled there from Raleigh, NC, and said he began getting sick three days after returning home. "It was gross," he said. "I literally vomited out cup loads of phlegm. Most of it was dark-colored. I've never had anything like this before." His doctor diagnosed pneumonia and prescribed antibiotics. When Phelps informed him about the Tularemia scare a few days later, the doctor said he would've have prescribed the same antibiotics for rabbit fever.

Salon also interviewed independent experts who scoffed at the idea that a "natural" source of the rabbit fever bacteria somehow ended up in the soil on the Mall and was kicked up into the air by all the protesters. They noted that the six sensors that detected the germs were located miles apart, indicating that a more likely explanation was dispersal from the air. (As at most such protests, there were various helicopters flying overhead all day.)

William Stanhope of the St. Louis University School of Public Health's Institute for Biosecurity told Salon he was convinced it was a botched terrorist attack. "I think we were lucky and the terrorists were not good," he said. "I am stunned that this has not been more of a story."

As for the CDC's "nature did it" explanation, Stanhope says: "One sensor, I'd say maybe. Two sensors is a stretch. Six sensors? I'm sorry, you don't have enough money to buy enough martinis to make me believe that it is naturally occurring at six different sites."

Dr. Steven Hinrichs of the University of Nebraska Center for Biosecurity agreed, telling Salon: "The fact that it happened in six locations would have supported an attack scenario... It could be a failed attack."

An attack, yes. But perhaps also a devious test that, far from failing, did exactly what it was supposed to do. Which again brings us back to the question: precisely who are the "bioterrorists"?

NEXT MONTH: Anthrax, bird flu, SARS and U.S. biological terrorism

SOURCES:

US Mission to the EU, press release on Bolton's position on the BWC
http://www.use.be/Categories/Defense/Nov1901BoltonBiologicalWeapons.html

"Biological alarm in Washington," by Mark Benjamin, Salon, Oct. 18, 2005
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/10/18/tularemia/index_np.html

"Tularemia at DC March," Progressive Society Blog, Nov. 5, 2005
http://www.progressivesociety.com/blog/?postid=284

The Sunshine Project
Research and facts about biological weapons and biotechnology
http://www.sunshine-project.org

WW4 REPORT ..15 on Bolton scuttling the Biological Weapons Convention
http://ww4report.com/15.html..shadows10

WW4 REPORT ..15 on the supposed al-Qaeda anthrax threat
http://ww4report.com/15.html..shadows6

WW4 REPORT ..45 on infiltration of UN Iraq inspections by U.S. spies
http://ww4report.com/45.html..iraq17

WW4 REPORT ..4 on U.S. sale of biological agents to Saddam Hussein
http://ww4report.com/4.html..shadows2

WW4 REPORT ..15 on U.S. Army origins of anthrax in the 2001 attacks
http://ww4report.com/15.html..shadows1

WW4 REPORT ..24 on FBI probe of U.S. Army facilities in anthrax attacks
http://ww4report.com/24.html..1anthrax

MYCOPLASMA
The Linking Pathogen in Neurosystemic Diseases
Several strains of mycoplasma have been "engineered" to become more dangerous. They are now being blamed for AIDS, cancer, CFS, MS, CJD and other neurosystemic diseases.

Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 8, Number 5 (August-September 2001)
PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. editor@nexusmagazine.com
Telephone: +61 (0)7 5442 9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381
From our web page at: www.nexusmagazine.com

� by Donald W. Scott, MA, MSc � 2001
President
The Common Cause
Medical Research Foundation
190 Mountain Street, Suite 405
Sudbury, Ontario, Canada P3B 4G2
Tel/fax: +1 (705) 670 0180
PATHOGENIC MYCOPLASMA

A Common Disease Agent Weaponised

There are 200 species of Mycoplasma. Most are innocuous and do no harm; only four or five are pathogenic. Mycoplasma fermentans (incognitus strain) probably comes from the nucleus of the Brucella bacterium. This disease agent is not a bacterium and not a virus; it is a mutated form of the Brucella bacterium, combined with a visna virus, from which the mycoplasma is extracted.

The pathogenic Mycoplasma used to be very innocuous, but biological warfare research conducted between 1942 and the present time has resulted in the creation of more deadly and infectious forms of Mycoplasma. Researchers extracted this mycoplasma from the Brucella bacterium and actually reduced the disease to a crystalline form. They "weaponised" it and tested it on an unsuspecting public in North America.

Dr Maurice Hilleman, chief virologist for the pharmaceutical company Merck Sharp & Dohme, stated that this disease agent is now carried by everybody in North America and possibly most people throughout the world.

Despite reporting flaws, there has clearly been an increased incidence of all the neuro/systemic degenerative diseases since World War II and especially since the 1970s with the arrival of previously unheard-of diseases like chronic fatigue syndrome and AIDS.

According to Dr Shyh-Ching Lo, senior researcher at The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and one of America's top mycoplasma researchers, this disease agent causes many illnesses including AIDS, cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, Crohn's colitis, Type I diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, Wegener's disease and collagen-vascular diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer's.

Dr Charles Engel, who is with the US National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, stated the following at an NIH meeting on February 7, 2000: "I am now of the view that the probable cause of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia is the mycoplasma..."

I have all the official documents to prove that mycoplasma is the disease agent in chronic fatigue syndrome/fibromyalgia as well as in AIDS, multiple sclerosis and many other illnesses. Of these, 80% are US or Canadian official government documents, and 20% are articles from peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, New England Journal of Medicine and the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The journal articles and government documents complement each other.
How the Mycoplasma Works

The mycoplasma acts by entering into the individual cells of the body, depending upon your genetic predisposition.

You may develop neurological diseases if the pathogen destroys certain cells in your brain, or you may develop Crohn's colitis if the pathogen invades and destroys cells in the lower bowel.

Once the mycoplasma gets into the cell, it can lie there doing nothing sometimes for 10, 20 or 30 years, but if a trauma occurs like an accident or a vaccination that doesn't take, the mycoplasma can become triggered.

Because it is only the DNA particle of the bacterium, it doesn't have any organelles to process its own nutrients, so it grows by uptaking pre-formed sterols from its host cell and it literally kills the cell; the cell ruptures and what is left gets dumped into the bloodstream.
II - CREATION OF THE MYCOPLASMA

A Laboratory-Made Disease Agent

Many doctors don't know about this mycoplasma disease agent because it was developed by the US military in biological warfare experimentation and it was not made public. This pathogen was patented by the United States military and Dr Shyh-Ching Lo. I have a copy of the documented patent from the US Patent Office.1

All the countries at war were experimenting with biological weapons. In 1942, the governments of the United States, Canada and Britain entered into a secret agreement to create two types of biological weapons (one that would kill, and one that was disabling) for use in the war against Germany and Japan, who were also developing biological weapons. While they researched a number of disease pathogens, they primarily focused on the Brucella bacterium and began to weaponise it.

From its inception, the biowarfare program was characterised by continuing in-depth review and participation by the most eminent scientists, medical consultants, industrial experts and government officials, and it was classified Top Secret.

The US Public Health Service also closely followed the progress of biological warfare research and development from the very start of the program, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States were working with the military in weaponising these diseases. These are diseases that have existed for thousands of years, but they have been weaponised--which means they've been made more contagious and more effective. And they are spreading.

The Special Virus Cancer Program, created by the CIA and NIH to develop a deadly pathogen for which humanity had no natural immunity (AIDS), was disguised as a war on cancer but was actually part of MKNAOMI.2 Many members of the Senate and House of Representatives do not know what has been going on. For example, the US Senate Committee on Government Reform had searched the archives in Washington and other places for the document titled "The Special Virus Cancer Program: Progress Report No. 8", and couldn't find it. Somehow they heard I had it, called me and asked me to mail it to them. Imagine: a retired schoolteacher being called by the United States Senate and asked for one of their secret documents! The US Senate, through the Government Reform Committee, is trying to stop this type of government research.
Crystalline Brucella

The title page of a genuine US Senate Study, declassified on February 24, 1977, shows that George Merck, of the pharmaceutical company, Merck Sharp & Dohme (which now makes cures for diseases that at one time it created), reported in 1946 to the US Secretary of War that his researchers had managed "for the first time" to "isolate the disease agent in crystalline form".3

They had produced a crystalline bacterial toxin extracted from the Brucella bacterium. The bacterial toxin could be removed in crystalline form and stored, transported and deployed without deteriorating. It could be delivered by other vectors such as insects, aerosol or the food chain (in nature it is delivered within the bacterium). But the factor that is working in the Brucella is the mycoplasma.

Brucella is a disease agent that doesn't kill people; it disables them. But, according to Dr Donald MacArthur of the Pentagon, appearing before a congressional committee in 1969,4 researchers found that if they had mycoplasma at a certain strength--actually, 10 to the 10th power (1010)--it would develop into AIDS, and the person would die from it within a reasonable period of time because it could bypass the natural human defences. If the strength was 108, the person would manifest with chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia. If it was 107, they would present as wasting; they wouldn't die and they wouldn't be disabled, but they would not be very interested in life; they would waste away.

Most of us have never heard of the disease brucellosis because it largely disappeared when they began pasteurising milk, which was the carrier. One salt shaker of the pure disease agent in a crystalline form could sicken the entire population of Canada. It is absolutely deadly, not so much in terms of killing the body but disabling it.

Because the crystalline disease agent goes into solution in the blood, ordinary blood and tissue tests will not reveal its presence. The mycoplasma will only crystallise at 8.1 pH, and the blood has a pH of 7.4 pH. So the doctor thinks your complaint is "all in your head".
Crystalline Brucella and Multiple Sclerosis

In 1998 in Rochester, New York, I met a former military man, PFC Donald Bentley, who gave me a document and told me: "I was in the US Army, and I was trained in bacteriological warfare. We were handling a bomb filled with brucellosis, only it wasn't brucellosis; it was a Brucella toxin in crystalline form. We were spraying it on the Chinese and North Koreans."

He showed me his certificate listing his training in chemical, biological and radiological warfare. Then he showed me 16 pages of documents given to him by the US military when he was discharged from the service. They linked brucellosis with multiple sclerosis, and stated in one section: "Veterans with multiple sclerosis, a kind of creeping paralysis developing to a degree of 10% or more disability within two years after separation from active service, may be presumed to be service-connected for disability compensation. Compensation is payable to eligible veterans whose disabilities are due to service." In other words: "If you become ill with multiple sclerosis, it is because you were handling this Brucella, and we will give you a pension. Don't go raising any fuss about it." In these documents, the government of the United States revealed evidence of the cause of multiple sclerosis, but they didn't make it known to the public--or to your doctor.

In a 1949 report, Drs Kyger and Haden suggested "the possibility that multiple sclerosis might be a central nervous system manifestation of chronic brucellosis". Testing approximately 113 MS patients, they found that almost 95% also tested positive for Brucella.5 We have a document from a medical journal, which concludes that one out of 500 people who had brucellosis would develop what they call neurobrucellosis; in other words, brucellosis in the brain, where the Brucella settles in the lateral ventricles--where the disease multiple sclerosis is basically located.6
Contamination of Camp Detrick Lab Workers

A 1948 New England Journal of Medicine report titled "Acute Brucellosis Among Laboratory Workers" shows us how actively dangerous this agent is.7 The laboratory workers were from Camp Detrick, Frederick, Maryland, where they were developing biological weapons. Even though these workers had been vaccinated, wore rubberised suits and masks and worked through holes in the compartment, many of them came down with this awful disease because it is so absolutely and terrifyingly infectious.

The article was written by Lt Calderone Howell, Marine Corps, Captain Edward Miller, Marine Corps, Lt Emily Kelly, United States Naval Reserve, and Captain Henry Bookman. They were all military personnel engaged in making the disease agent Brucella into a more effective biological weapon.
III - COVERT TESTING OF MYCOPLASMA

Testing the Dispersal Methods

Documented evidence proves that the biological weapons they were developing were tested on the public in various communities without their knowledge or consent.

The government knew that crystalline Brucella would cause disease in humans. Now they needed to determine how it would spread and the best way to disperse it. They tested dispersal methods for Brucella suis and Brucella melitensis at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, in June and September 1952. Probably, 100% of us now are infected with Brucella suis and Brucella melitensis.8

Another government document recommended the genesis of open-air vulnerability tests and covert research and development programs to be conducted by the Army and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency.

At that time, the Government of Canada was asked by the US Government to cooperate in testing weaponised Brucella, and Canada cooperated fully with the United States. The US Government wanted to determine whether mosquitoes would carry the disease and also if the air would carry it. A government report stated that "open-air testing of infectious biological agents is considered essential to an ultimate understanding of biological warfare potentialities because of the many unknown factors affecting the degradation of micro-organisms in the atmosphere".9
Testing via Mosquito Vector in Punta Gorda, Florida

A report from The New England Journal of Medicine reveals that one of the first outbreaks of chronic fatigue syndrome was in Punta Gorda, Florida, back in 1957.10 It was a strange coincidence that a week before these people came down with chronic fatigue syndrome, there was a huge influx of mosquitoes.

The National Institutes of Health claimed that the mosquitoes came from a forest fire 30 miles away. The truth is that those mosquitoes were infected in Canada by Dr Guilford B. Reed at Queen's University. They were bred in Belleville, Ontario, and taken down to Punta Gorda and released there.

Within a week, the first five cases ever of chronic fatigue syndrome were reported to the local clinic in Punta Gorda. The cases kept coming until finally 450 people were ill with the disease.
Testing via Mosquito Vector in Ontario

The Government of Canada had established the Dominion Parasite Laboratory in Belleville, Ontario, where it raised 100 million mosquitoes a month. These were shipped to Queen's University and certain other facilities to be infected with this crystalline disease agent. The mosquitoes were then let loose in certain communities in the middle of the night, so that the researchers could determine how many people would become ill with chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia, which was the first disease to show.

One of the communities they tested it on was the St Lawrence Seaway valley, all the way from Kingston to Cornwall, in 1984. They let out hundreds of millions of infected mosquitoes. Over 700 people in the next four or five weeks developed myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome.
IV - COVERT TESTING OF OTHER DISEASE AGENTS

Mad Cow Disease/Kuru/CJD in the Fore Tribe

Before and during World War II, at the infamous Camp 731 in Manchuria, the Japanese military contaminated prisoners of war with certain disease agents.

They also established a research camp in New Guinea in 1942. There they experimented upon the Fore Indian tribe and inoculated them with a minced-up version of the brains of diseased sheep containing the visna virus which causes "mad cow disease" or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

About five or six years later, after the Japanese had been driven out, the poor people of the Fore tribe developed what they called kuru, which was their word for "wasting", and they began to shake, lose their appetites and die. The autopsies revealed that their brains had literally turned to mush. They had contracted "mad cow disease" from the Japanese experiments.

When World War II ended, Dr Ishii Shiro--the medical doctor who was commissioned as a General in the Japanese Army so he could take command of Japan's biological warfare development, testing and deployment--was captured. He was given the choice of a job with the United States Army or execution as a war criminal. Not surprisingly, Dr Ishii Shiro chose to work with the US military to demonstrate how the Japanese had created mad cow disease in the Fore Indian tribe.

In 1957, when the disease was beginning to blossom in full among the Fore people, Dr Carleton Gajdusek of the US National Institutes of Health headed to New Guinea to determine how the minced-up brains of the visna-infected sheep affected them. He spent a couple of years there, studying the Fore people, and wrote an extensive report. He won the Nobel Prize for "discovering" kuru disease in the Fore tribe.
Testing Carcinogens over Winnipeg, Manitoba

In 1953, the US Government asked the Canadian Government if it could test a chemical over the city of Winnipeg. It was a big city with 500,000 people, miles from anywhere. The American military sprayed this carcinogenic chemical in a 1,000%-attenuated form, which they said would be so watered down that nobody would get very sick; however, if people came to clinics with a sniffle, a sore throat or ringing in their ears, the researchers would be able to determine what percentage would have developed cancer if the chemical had been used at full strength.

We located evidence that the Americans had indeed tested this carcinogenic chemical--zinc cadmium sulphide--over Winnipeg in 1953. We wrote to the Government of Canada, explaining that we had solid evidence of the spraying and asking that we be informed as to how high up in the government the request for permission to spray had gone. We did not receive a reply.

Shortly after, the Pentagon held a press conference on May 14, 1997, where they admitted what they had done. Robert Russo, writing for the Toronto Star11 from Washington, DC, reported the Pentagon's admission that in 1953 it had obtained permission from the Canadian Government to fly over the city of Winnipeg and spray out this chemical--which sifted down on kids going to school, housewives hanging out their laundry and people going to work. US Army planes and trucks released the chemical 36 times between July and August 1953. The Pentagon got its statistics, which indicated that if the chemical released had been full strength, approximately a third of the population of Winnipeg would have developed cancers over the next five years.

One professor, Dr Hugh Fudenberg, MD, twice nominated for the Nobel Prize, wrote a magazine article stating that the Pentagon came clean on this because two researchers in Sudbury, Ontario--Don Scott and his son, Bill Scott--had been revealing this to the public. However, the legwork was done by other researchers!

The US Army actually conducted a series of simulated germ warfare tests over Winnipeg. The Pentagon lied about the tests to the mayor, saying that they were testing a chemical fog over the city, which would protect Winnipeg in the event of a nuclear attack.

A report commissioned by US Congress, chaired by Dr Rogene Henderson, lists 32 American towns and cities used as test sites as well.
V - BRUCELLA MYCOPLASMA AND DISEASE

AIDS

The AIDS pathogen was created out of a Brucella bacterium mutated with a visna virus; then the toxin was removed as a DNA particle called a mycoplasma. They used the same mycoplasma to develop disabling diseases like MS, Crohn's colitis, Lyme disease, etc.

In the previously mentioned US congressional document of a meeting held on June 9, 1969,12 the Pentagon delivered a report to Congress about biological weapons. The Pentagon stated: "We are continuing to develop disabling weapons." Dr MacArthur, who was in charge of the research, said: "We are developing a new lethal weapon, a synthetic biological agent that does not naturally exist, and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired."

Think about it. If you have a deficiency of acquired immunity, you have an acquired immunity deficiency. Plain as that. AIDS.

In laboratories throughout the United States and in a certain number in Canada including at the University of Alberta, the US Government provided the leadership for the development of AIDS for the purpose of population control. After the scientists had perfected it, the government sent medical teams from the Centers for Disease Control--under the direction of Dr Donald A. Henderson, their investigator into the 1957 chronic fatigue epidemic in Punta Gorda--during 1969 to 1971 to Africa and some countries such as India, Nepal and Pakistan where they thought the population was becoming too large.13 They gave them all a free vaccination against smallpox; but five years after receiving this vaccination, 60% of those inoculated were suffering from AIDS. They tried to blame it on a monkey, which is nonsense.

A professor at the University of Arkansas made the claim that while studying the tissues of a dead chimpanzee she found traces of HIV. The chimpanzee that she had tested was born in the United States 23 years earlier. It had lived its entire life in a US military laboratory where it was used as an experimental animal in the development of these diseases. When it died, its body was shipped to a storage place where it was deep-frozen and stored in case they wanted to analyse it later. Then they decided that they didn't have enough space for it, so they said, "Anybody want this dead chimpanzee?" and this researcher from Arkansas said: "Yes. Send it down to the University of Arkansas. We are happy to get anything that we can get." They shipped it down and she found HIV in it. That virus was acquired by that chimpanzee in the laboratories where it was tested.14
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/ Myalgic Encephalomyelitis

Chronic fatigue syndrome is more accurately called myalgic encephalomyelitis. The chronic fatigue syndrome nomenclature was given by the US National Institutes of Health because it wanted to downgrade and belittle the disease.

An MRI scan of the brain of a teenage girl with chronic fatigue syndrome displayed a great many scars or punctate lesions in the left frontal lobe area where portions of the brain had literally dissolved and been replaced by scar tissue. This caused cognitive impairment, memory impairment, etc. And what was the cause of the scarring? The mycoplasma. So there is very concrete physical evidence of these tragic diseases, even though doctors continue to say they don't know where it comes from or what they can do about it.

Many people with chronic fatigue syndrome, myalgic encephalo-myelitis and fibromyalgia who apply to the Canada Pensions Plan Review Tribunal will be turned down because they cannot prove that they are ill. During 1999 I conducted several appeals to Canada Pensions and the Workers Compensation Board (WCB, now the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board) on behalf of people who have been turned down. I provided documented evidence of these illnesses, and these people were all granted their pensions on the basis of the evidence that I provided.

In March 1999, for example, I appealed to the WCB on behalf of a lady with fibromyalgia who had been denied her pension back in 1993. The vice-chairman of the board came to Sudbury to hear the appeal, and I showed him a number of documents which proved that this lady was physically ill with fibromyalgia. It was a disease that caused physical damage, and the disease agent was a mycoplasma. The guy listened for three hours, and then he said to me: "Mr Scott, how is it I have never heard of any of this before? I said: "We brought a top authority in this area into Sudbury to speak on this subject and not a single solitary doctor came to that presentation."
VI - TESTING FOR MYCOPLASMA IN YOUR BODY

Polymerase Chain Reaction Test

Information is not generally available about this agent because, first of all, the mycoplasma is such a minutely small disease agent. A hundred years ago, certain medical theoreticians conceived that there must be a form of disease agent smaller than bacteria and viruses. This pathogenic organism, the mycoplasma, is so minute that normal blood and tissue tests will not reveal its presence as the source of the disease.

Your doctor may diagnose you with Alzheimer's disease, and he will say: "Golly, we don't know where Alzheimer's comes from. All we know is that your brain begins to deteriorate, cells rupture, the myelin sheath around the nerves dissolves, and so on." Or if you have chronic fatigue syndrome, the doctor will not be able to find any cause for your illness with ordinary blood and tissue tests.

This mycoplasma couldn't be detected until about 30 years ago when the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test was developed, in which a sample of your blood is examined and damaged particles are removed and subjected to a polymerase chain reaction. This causes the DNA in the particles to break down. The particles are then placed in a nutrient, which causes the DNA to grow back into its original form. If enough of the substance is produced, the form can be recognised, so it can be determined whether Brucella or another kind of agent is behind that particular mycoplasma.
Blood Test

If you or anybody in your family has myalgic encephalomyelitis, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis or Alzheimer's, you can send a blood sample to Dr Les Simpson in New Zealand for testing.

If you are ill with these diseases, your red blood cells will not be normal doughnut-shaped blood cells capable of being compressed and squeezed through the capillaries, but will swell up like cherry-filled doughnuts which cannot be compressed. The blood cells become enlarged and distended because the only way the mycoplasma can exist is by uptaking pre-formed sterols from the host cell. One of the best sources of pre-formed sterols is cholesterol, and cholesterol is what gives your blood cells flexibility. If the cholesterol is taken out by the mycoplasma, the red blood cell swells up and doesn't go through, and the person begins to feel all the aches and pains and all the damage it causes to the brain, the heart, the stomach, the feet and the whole body because blood and oxygen are cut off.

And that is why people with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome have such a terrible time. When the blood is cut off from the brain, punctate lesions appear because those parts of the brain die. The mycoplasma will get into portions of the heart muscle, especially the left ventricle, and those cells will die. Certain people have cells in the lateral ventricles of the brain that have a genetic predisposition to admit the mycoplasma, and this causes the lateral ventricles to deteriorate and die. This leads to multiple sclerosis, which will progress until these people are totally disabled; frequently, they die prematurely. The mycoplasma will get into the lower bowel, parts of which will die, thus causing colitis. All of these diseases are caused by the degenerating properties of the mycoplasma.

In early 2000, a gentleman in Sudbury phoned me and told me he had fibromyalgia. He applied for a pension and was turned down because his doctor said it was all in his head and there was no external evidence. I gave him the proper form and a vial, and he sent his blood to Dr Simpson to be tested. He did this with his family doctor's approval, and the results from Dr Simpson showed that only 4% of his red blood cells were functioning normally and carrying the appropriate amount of oxygen to his poor body, whereas 83% were distended, enlarged and hardened, and wouldn't go through the capillaries without an awful lot of pressure and trouble. This is the physical evidence of the damage that is done.
ECG Test

You can also ask your doctor to give you a 24-hour Holter ECG. You know, of course, that an electrocardiogram is a measure of your heartbeat and shows what is going on in the right ventricle, the left ventricle and so on. Tests show that 100% of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia have an irregular heartbeat. At various periods during the 24 hours, the heart, instead of working happily away going "bump-BUMP, bump-BUMP", every now and again goes "buhbuhbuhbuhbuhbuhbuhbuhbuh". The T-wave (the waves are called P, Q, R, S and T) is normally a peak, and then the wave levels off and starts with the P-wave again. In chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia patients, the T-wave flattens off, or actually inverts. That means the blood in the left ventricle is not being squeezed up through the aorta and around through the body.

My client from Sudbury had this test done and, lo and behold, the results stated: "The shape of T and S-T suggests left ventricle strain pattern, although voltage and so on is normal." The doctor had no clue as to why the T-wave was not working properly. I analysed the report of this patient who had been turned down by Canada Pensions and sent it back to them. They wrote back, saying: "It looks like we may have made a mistake. We are going to give you a hearing and you can explain this to us in more detail."

So it is not all in your imagination. There is actual physical damage to the heart. The left ventricle muscles do show scarring. That is why many people are diagnosed with a heart condition when they first develop fibromyalgia, but it's only one of several problems because the mycoplasma can do all kinds of damage.
Blood Volume Test

You can also ask your doctor for a blood volume test. Every human being requires a certain amount of blood per pound of body weight, and it has been observed that people with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple sclerosis and other illnesses do not have the normal blood volume their body needs to function properly. Doctors aren't normally aware of this.

This test measures the amount of blood in the human body by taking out 5 cc, putting a tracer in it and then putting it back into the body. One hour later, take out 5 cc again and look for the tracer. The thicker the blood and the lower the blood volume, the more tracer you will find.

The analysis of one of my clients stated: "This patient was referred for red cell mass study. The red cell volume is 16.9 ml per kg of body weight. The normal range is 25 to 35 ml per kg. This guy has 36% less blood in his body than the body needs to function." And the doctor hadn't even known the test existed.

If you lost 36% of your blood in an accident, do you think your doctor would tell you that you are alright and should just take up line dancing and get over it? They would rush you to the nearest hospital and start transfusing you with blood. These tragic people with these awful diseases are functioning with anywhere from 7% to 50% less blood than their body needs to function.
VII - UNDOING THE DAMAGE

The body undoes the damage itself. The scarring in the brain of people with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia will be repaired. There is cellular repair going on all the time. But the mycoplasma has moved on to the next cell.

In the early stages of a disease, doxycycline may reverse that disease process. It is one of the tetracycline antibiotics, but it is not bactericidal; it is bacteriostatic--it stops the growth of the mycoplasma. And if the mycoplasma growth can be stopped for long enough, then the immune system takes over.

Doxycycline treatment is discussed in a paper by mycoplasma expert Professor Garth Nicholson, PhD, of the Institute for Molecular Medicine.15 Dr Nicholson is involved in a US$8-million mycoplasma research program funded by the US military and headed by Dr Charles Engel of the NIH. The program is studying Gulf War veterans, 450 of them, because there is evidence to suggest that Gulf War syndrome is another illness (or set of illnesses) caused by mycoplasma.

Source:

Donald Scott, MA, MSc, is a retired high school teacher and university professor. He is also a veteran of WWII and was awarded the North Atlantic Star, the Burma Star with Clasp, the 1939-1945 Volunteer Service Medal and the Victory Medal. He is currently President of The Common Cause Medical Research Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation devoted to research into neurosystemic degenerative diseases. He is also Adjunct Professor with the Institute for Molecular Medicine and he produces and edits the Journal of Degenerative Diseases. He has extensively researched neurosystemic degenerative diseases over the past five years and has authored many documents on the relationship between degenerative diseases and a pathogenic mycoplasma called Mycoplasma fermentans. His research is based upon solid government evidence.

Autism patients have systemic bacterial, viral and fungal infections that may play an important part in their illnesses. We found that immediate family members of veterans diagnosed with Gulf War Illnesses (GWI) often complain of fatigue and other problems, and upon analysis they report similar signs and symptoms as their veteran family members, except that their children are often diagnosed with Autism. Since a relatively common finding in GWI patients is a bacterial infection due to Mycoplasma fermentans, we examined military families (149 patients: 42 veterans, 40 spouses, 32 other relatives and 35 children with at least one family complaint of illness) selected from a group of 110 veterans with GWI who tested positive (~42for mycoplasmal infections. Consistent with previous results, over 80f GWI patients who were positive for blood mycoplasmal infections had only one Mycoplasma species, M. fermentans. In healthy control subjects the incidence of any mycoplasmal infection was ~8.5nd none were found to have multiple mycoplasmal species (P<0.001). In 107 family members of mycoplasma-positive GWI patients there were 57 patients (53that had essentially the same signs and symptoms as the veterans and were diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS/ME) and/or Fibromyalgia Syndrome. The majority of children (n=35) in this group were diagnosed with Autism. Most of these CFS or Autism patients also had mycoplasmal infections compared to the few non-symptomatic family members (P<0.001), and the most common species found was M. fermentans. In contrast, in the few non-symptomatic family members that tested mycoplasma-positive, the Mycoplasma species were usually different from the species found in the GWI patients. The results suggest that a subset of GWI patients have mycoplasmal infections, and these infections can be transmitted to immediate family members who subsequently display similar signs and symptoms, except for their children who are often diagnosed with Autism. In a separate study in Central California we examined a group of Autism patients and also found a high incidence of mycoplasmal infections, but in contrast to the military families a variety of Mycoplasma species were detected.

Source:


Chronic Mycoplasmal Infections in Gulf War Veteransâ Children and Autism Patients

Garth L. Nicolson, PhD, Paul Berns, MD, Robert Gan, MD, and Jeorg Haier, MD, PhD

Chronology of Dead Scientists


Maybe its their Karma


2001

..1-5: Five Unnamed Microbiologists. Died: October 4, 2001 Four of Five unnamed microbiologists on a plane that was brought down by a missile near the Black sea on the Russian border. Traveling from Israel to Russia; business not disclosed. Three scientists were experts in medical research or public health. The plane is believed by many in Israel to have had as many as four or five passengers who were microbiologists. Both Israel and Novosibirsk are homes for cutting-edge microbiological research. Novosibirsk is known as the scientific capital of Siberia. There are over 50 research facilities there, and 13 full universities for a population of only 2.5 million people.

..6: Dr. Benito Que, Age: 52. Found Comatose: November 12, 2001. Died later in hospital. Found in the street near the laboratory where he worked at the University of Miami Medical School. He was a cell biologist, involved in research on aids, oncology research in the hematology department.

..7-..9: Avishai Berkman, Amiramp Eldor and Yaacov Matzner Died: November 24, 2001 Another airplane crash kills 3 scientists. At about the time of the Black Sea crash, Israeli journalists had been sounding the alarm that two Israeli microbiologists had been murdered, allegedly by terrorists; including the head of the Hematology department at Israel's Ichilov Hospital, as well as directors of the Tel Aviv Public Health Department and Hebrew University School of Medicine. Five microbiologists in this list of the first eight people that died mysteriously in airplane crashes worked on cutting edge microbiology research. Four of the five were doing virtually identical research - research that has global political and financial significance.

..10: Dr. David Schwartz, Age: 57. Died: December 10, 2001. Murdered by stabbing in rural home Loudon County, Virginia. He was extremely well respected in biophysics, and regarded as an authority on DNA sequencing. Three teens who were into the occult were charged with murder in the slashing death.

..11: Dr. Set Van Nguyen, Died: December 14, 2001. Found dead in the airlock entrance to the walk-in refrigerator in the laboratory he worked at in Victoria State, Australia. The room was full of deadly gas which had leaked from a liquid nitrogen cooling system. Room was vented. Working on a vaccine to protect against biological weapons, or a weapon itself. In January, 2001, the magazine Nature published information that two scientists, Dr. Ron Jackson and Dr. Ian Ramshaw, using genetic manipulation and DNA sequencing, had created an incredibly virulent form of mousepox, a cousin of smallpox and Dr. Nguyen had worked for 15 years at the same Australian facility.

..12: Dr. Don Wiley Age: 57, Vanished December 16, 2001. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard University, top Deadly Contagious Virus expert, vanished; abandoned rental car was found on the Hernando de Soto Bridge outside Memphis, TN. He was heavily involved in research on DNA sequencing, and was last seen at around midnight on November 16, leaving the St. Jude's Children's Research Advisory Dinner at The Peabody Hotel in Memphis, TN. Associates attending the dinner said he showed no signs of intoxication, and no one has admitted to drinking with him.

..13: Dr. Vladimer Pasechnik Age: 64, Found Dead: December 23, 2001. Found dead in Wiltshire, England, a village near his home. He had defected from Russia to UK. He had been the ..1 scientist in the FSU's bioweapons program. It was thought he was involved with exhuming the bodies of the 10 London victims of the 1919 Type A flu epidemic. Pasechnik died six weeks after the planned exhumations were announced. On November 23, 2001, Pasechnik's death was reported in the New York Times as having occurred two days earlier. Pasechnik's death was made in the United States by Dr. Christopher Davis of Virginia, who stated that the cause of death was a stroke. Dr. Davis was the member of British intelligence who de-briefed Dr. Pasechnik at the time of his defection. Pasechnik was heavily involved in DNA sequencing research. He had just founded a company like three other microbiologists working to provide powerful alternatives to antibiotics. Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik was the boss of William C. Patrick III who holds five patents on the militarized anthrax used by the United States. Patrick is now a private biowarfare consultant to the military and CIA. Patrick developed the process by which anthrax spores could be concentrated at the level of one trillion spores per gram. No other country has been able to get concentrations above 500 billion per gram. The anthrax that was sent around the eastern United States last fall was concentrated at one trillion spores per gram.


2002

..14: Dr. Alexi Brushlinski. Died: January 2002. Russian Microbiologist. Murdered, and Brushlinski was killed in Moscow. Well known around the world and members of the Russian Academy of Science.

..15: Dr. Ivan Glebov. Died: January 2002 Russian Microbiologist. Glebov died as the result of a bandit attack. Well known around the world and members of the Russian Academy of Science.

..16: Dr. Vladamir Korshunov Age: 56. Died: February 9, 2002. Found dead on a Moscow street. Head was bashed in. Korshunov was head of the microbiology sub-facility at the Russian State Medical University. He was found dead in the entrance to his home with a head injury. On Feb. 9 the Russian newspaper Pravda reported that Korshunov had probably invented either a vaccine to protect against biological weapons, or a weapon itself.

..17: Dr. Ian Langford Age: 40, Died: February 12, 2002. A Russian who was a Senior Research Associate in CSERGE, UK. He was a leading university research scientist working on Global Environment, specializing in links between human health and the environment risk, was found dead at his blood-spattered and apparently ransacked home. Specialist in leukemia and infections.

..18: Tanya Holzmayer 46, Died: February 28, 2002: Two dead microbiologists in San Francisco: While taking delivery of a pizza, Tanya Holzmayer was shot and killed by a colleague, Guyang Huang, 38, who then apparently shot himself. Holzmayer moved to the US from Russia in 1989. Her research focused on the part of the human molecular structure that could be affected best by medicine. Holzmayer was focusing on helping create new drugs that interfere with replication of the virus that causes AIDS. One year earlier, Holzmayer obeyed senior management orders to fire Huang.

..19: Dr. David Wynn-Williams Age: 55 Died: March 24, 2002. Hit by a car while jogging near his home in Cambridge, England. He was an astrobiologist with the Antarctic Astrobiology Project and the NASA Ames Research Center. He was studying the capability of microbes to adapt to environmental extremes, including the bombardment of ultraviolet rays and global warming.

..20: Steven Mostow, Age: 63, Died: March 25, 2002. One of the country's leading infectious disease and bioterrorism experts and was associate dean at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. He died in a plane crash near Centennial Airport. He was known as "Dr. Flu" for his expertise in treating influenza, and expertise on bioterrorism. Mostow was one of the country's leading infectious disease experts.

..21: Roman Kuzmin 24-year-old Russian surgeon studying in Connecticut was fatally struck by a car as he fled a store with three stolen rolls of film, police said. He was studying to be an orthopedic surgeon.



2003

NOTE: More than 310 Iraqi scientists are thought to have perished at the hands of Israeli secret agents in Iraq since fall of Baghdad to US troops in April 2003.

..22: Dr. Leland Rickman, Age: 47. Died June 24, 2003. UC San Diego expert on infectious diseases and, since Sept. 11, 2001 a consultant on bioterrorism. He was 47. Rickman died while on a teaching assignment in Lesotho, a small country bordered on all sides by South Africa. He had complained of a headache, but the cause of death was not immediately known. The physician had been working in Lesotho with Dr. Chris Mathews, director of the UC San Diego Medical Center's Owen Clinic, teaching African medical personnel about the prevention and treatment of AIDS. Rickman, the incoming president of the Infectious Disease Assn. of California, was a multidisciplinary professor and practitioner with expertise in infectious diseases, internal medicine, epidemiology, microbiology and antibiotic utilization

..23: David Kelly, Died: July 18, 2003. British biological weapons expert, was said to have slashed his own wrists while walking near his home. Kelly was the Ministry of Defence's chief scientific officer and senior adviser to the proliferation and arms control secretariat, and to the Foreign Office's non-proliferation department. The senior adviser on biological weapons to the UN biological weapons inspections teams (Unscom) from 1994 to 1999, he was also, in the opinion of his peers, pre-eminent in his field, not only in this country, but in the world.

..24: Michael Perich, Age: 46. Died: October 11, 2003. Died in one-vehicle car accident. The LSU West Nile research scientist was wearing his seat belt and drowned. He was LSU professor who helped fight the spread of the West Nile virus.

..25: Robert Leslie Burghoff Age: 45. Died November 20, 2003. Scientist. Killed by a hit and run driver that jumped the kerb and ploughed into him in the 1600 block of South Braeswood, Texas. He was studying the virus plaguing cruise ships. April 2004: Mohammed Munim al-Izmerly, a distinguished Iraqi chemistry professor dies in American custody from a sudden hit to the back of his head caused by blunt trauma. It was uncertain exactly how he died, but someone had hit him from behind, possibly with a bar or a pistol. His battered corpse turned up at Baghdad's morgue and the cause of death was initially recorded as "brainstem compression". It was discovered that US doctors had made a 20cm incision in his skull.



2004

..26: Robert Shope, Age: 74, Died: January 23, 2004. Virus Expert Who Warned of Epidemics, Dies died of lung transplant complications. Later purported to have died of Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis which can be caused by either environmental stimulus or a VIRUS. Dr. Shope led the group of scientists who had an 11 MILLION dollar fed grant to ensure the new lab would keep in the nasty bugs. Dr. Shope also met with and worked with Dr. Mike Kiley on the UTMB Galveston lab upgrade to BSL 4. When the upgrade would be complete the lab will host the most hazardous pathogens known to man especially tropical and emerging diseases as well as bioweapons.

..27: Dr. Michael Patrick Kiley, Age: 62. Died: January 24, 2004. Expert on Mad Cow and Ebola. He had a good heart, but it gave out and death ruled heart failure.

..28: Vadake Srinivasan Died: March 13, 2004. Microbiologist crashed car into guard rail and ruled a stroke.

..29 Unnamed. Age: Unknown. Died: May 5, 2004: A Russian scientist at a former Soviet biological weapons laboratory in Siberia died after an accident with a needle laced with ebola. Scientists and officials said the accident had raised concerns about safety and secrecy at the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, known as Vector, which in Soviet times specialized in turning deadly viruses into biological weapons. Vector has been a leading recipient of aid in an American programme.

..30: William T. McGuire , Age: 39 Body Found May 5, 2004, last seen late April 2004. Body found in 3 Suitcases floating in Chesapeake Bay. Was NJ University Professor and Senior programmer analyst and adjunct professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark.

..31: Dr. Eugene Mallove, Age: 56. Died: May 14, 2004. Murdered in attack at end of his driveway. Alt. Energy Expert who was working on viable energy alternative program and announcement. Norwich Free Academy graduate. Beaten to death during an alleged robbery. Mallove was well respected for his knowledge of cold fusion. He had just published an open letter outlining the results of and reasons for his last 15 years in the field of new energy research. Dr. Mallove was convinced it was only a matter of months before the world would actually see a free energy device.

..32: Antonina Presnyakova Died: May 25, 2004. Former Soviet biological weapons laboratory in Siberia has died after accidentally sticking herself with a needle laced with Ebola Russian scientist dies in Ebola accident at former weapons lab.

..33: Thomas Gold. Died: June 22, 2004. Austrian born Thomas Gold famous over the years for a variety of bold theories that flout conventional wisdom died of heart failure. Golds theory of the deep hot biosphere holds important ramifications for the possibility of life on other planets, including seemingly inhospitable planets within our own solar system. He was Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at Cornell University and was the founder (and for 20 years director) of Cornell Center for Radiophysics and Space Research. He was also involved in air accident investigation.

..34: Dr. Assefa Tulu, Age: 45. Died: June 24, 2004. Found dead in his office. Dallas County Epidemiologist.

..35 Dr Paul Norman, Age: 52. Died: June 27, 2004. Of Salisbury Wiltshire. Killed when the single-engine Cessna 206 he was piloting crashed in Devon. Expert in chemical and biological weapons. He traveled the world lecturing on defending against the scourge of weapons of mass destruction. He was married with a 14-year-old son and a 20-year-old daughter, and was the chief scientist for chemical and biological defence at the Ministry of Defences laboratory at Porton Down, Wiltshire. The crash site was examined by officials from the Air Accidents Investigation Branch and the wreckage of the aircraft was removed from the site to the AAIB base at Farnborough.

..36: John Mullen Age: 67. Died: June 29, 2004. A Nuclear physicist poisoned with a huge dose of arsenic. A nuclear research scientist with McDonnell Douglas dies from a huge dose of poisonous arsenic. Police investigating will not say how Mullen was exposed to the arsenic or where it came from. At the time of his death he was doing contract work for Boeing.

..37: Dr Bassem al-Mudares. Died July 21, 2004. Mutilated body was found in the city of Samarra, Iraq*. He was a Ph.D. chemist and had been tortured before being killed.

..38: Dr. John Badwey, Age 54. Died: July 21, 2004. Scientist and accidental politician when he opposed disposal of sewage waste program of exposing humans to sludge. Suddenly developed pneumonia like symptoms then died in two weeks. Biochemist at Harvard Medical School specializing in infectious diseases.

..39: Professor John Clark, Age: 52, Died: August 12, 2004. Found hanged in his holiday home. An expert in animal science and biotechnology where he developed techniques for the genetic modification of livestock; this work paved the way for the birth, in 1996, of Dolly the sheep, the first animal to have been cloned from an adult. Head of the science lab which created Dolly the sheep. Prof Clark led the Roslin Institute in Midlothian, one of the worlds leading animal biotechnology research centres. He played a crucial role in creating the transgenic sheep that earned the institute worldwide fame. Prof Clark also founded three spin-out firms from Roslin - PPL Therapeutics, Rosgen and Roslin BioMed.

..40: Mohammed Toki Hussein al-Talakani Died: September 5, 2004: Iraqi nuclear scientist* was shot dead in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad. He was a practising nuclear physicist since 1984.

..41: Matthew Allison Age: 32. Died: October 13, 2004. Fatal explosion of a car parked at an Osceola County, Fla., Wal-Mart store was no accident, Local 6 News has learned. Found inside a burned car. Witnesses said the man left the store at about 11 p.m. and entered his Ford Taurus car when it exploded. Investigators said they found a Duraflame log and propane canisters on the front passenger's seat.

..42: John R. La Montagne, Died: November 2, 2004. Died while in Mexico, no cause stated. Ph.D., Head of US Infectious Diseases unit under Tommie Thompson. Was NIAID Deputy Director.

..43: Taleb Ibrahim al-Daher Died: December 21, 2004: Iraqi nuclear scientist was shot dead north of Baghdad by unknown gunmen. He was on his way to work at Diyala University when armed men opened fire on his car as it was crossing a bridge in Baqouba, 57 km northeast of Baghdad. The vehicle swerved off the bridge and fell into the Khrisan river. Al-Daher, who was a professor at the local university, was removed from the submerged car and rushed to Baqouba hospital where he was pronounced dead.

..44 and 45: Tom Thorne and Beth Williams Died: December 29, 2004 Two wild life scientists, Husband-and-wife wildlife veterinarians who were nationally prominent experts on chronic wasting disease and brucellosis were killed in a snowy-weather crash on U.S. 287 in northern Colorado.



2005

..46: Jeong H. Im Age: 72. Died: January 7, 2005. Korean Jeong H. Im, retired research assistant professor at the University of Missouri - Columbia and primarily a protein chemist, died of multiple stab wounds to the chest before firefighters found in his body in the trunk of a burning car on the third level of the Maryland Avenue Garage. MUPD with the assistance of the Columbia Police Department and Columbia Fire Department are conducting a death investigation of the incident. A person of interest described as a male 6 62 wearing some type of mask possible a painters mask or drywall type mask was seen in the area of the Maryland Avenue Garage. Researcher, retired protein chemist, was found in the burning trunk of his car with stab wounds to the chest.

Repost from Dr .............





Emerging Diseases in the 21st Century/With a Vengence



How are these diseases emerging?



Fall 1999, New York area experienced just such an event. A non endemic
disease broke out in a "hot zone" in Northern Queens.


Was this altered strain a result of climate change or did it emerge
from a Lab, Plum Island, Yale, or some other lab?


Plum Island is located less then 2 miles from the Eastern shore of
Long Island, Orient Pt. It is less then 13 miles across Long Island Sound
from our Submarine base at Groton, Ct. (Pathogens deemed too dangerous to
enter via JFK, are brought via submarine and transferred to a Govt. Ferry to
Plum Island.



Plum Island is a biolevel 5 facility. In 1996 SUNY Stoney Brook had
been considering joint experiments with Plum Island, using the biolevel 4
lab at Plum Island.



Why then do we hear in the press, that Plum Island is seeking funds to
upgrade from level 3 to a level 4 facility?
This request to "upgrade" to "bogus" level 4 came on the heels of the
West Nile like outbreak. March 1999 and also. during the summer there were a
sequence of power outages.



Some background on Plum is needed.



March 1999, Plum island installed an undersea fiberoptic cable. During
the finalization of the cable, by STV Inc. all power to Plum Island was
lost. Plum Island needs power to maintain biocontainment.



Plum Island has had a horrific safety violation record and has been
cited by the EPA as late as Spring 1999.
In March 1999, the (now previous) Director, Alfonso Torres, gave his
resignation. A new Director, Dr. LeeAnn Thomas, took over in July of 1999.

Some of the attached links prove that Plum is not a biolevel 3, but it
is a biolevel 5 faciliity, one of only a few worldwide. According to Dr.
Alfonso Torres and also Dr. Kiley of Plum Island, Plum Island is the only
biolevel 5 facility in the US.



Why would Plum Island seek the bogus level 4 upgrade after the
outbreak of the WNV?

I do not have that answer.
It is theorized that Plum island needs funds just to maintain its
present biocontainment. (according to Dr. Kiley 1998 meeting USAHA Committee
on Government Relations.)

Plum Island had been working with Japanese Encephalitis since the
early 1990's. Plum Island/Yale Scientists had even tested JE vaccine on
HUMAN VOLUNTEERS.



Background: 1978 bioaccident. FMD microbes escaped. Workers were
evacuated in paper coveralls, lab animals were incinerated and the island
was sprayed with toxic chemicals. I have corresponded with a person who
lived near Plum Island at that time, and claims to have contracted Foot and
Mouth Disease, as was the case with other children at that time.


Was this same toxic spraying done March 1999 and other times when the
power was out?



http://www.nalusda.gov/ttic/tektran/data/000009/05/0000090536.html
Yes, Plum Island has been working with JE as the above link proves.
Why would an animal facility test JE vaccine on HUMAN VOLUNTEERS?
There has been a loss of the lobster population in Long Island Sound,
Fall 1999.



Did installation of the STV Inc. Cable cause the hazardous waste that
Plum Island was cited for illegally dumping in 1998 to be drudged up?

Did
this or toxic chemical spraying of the island cause the algal bloom to
become toxic and thereby cause the killoff?


Why did the Mayor of the City of New York, OVER REACT, and spray
deadly Malathion when he learned of 3 deaths of elderly people. He did not
follow legal steps to obtain a permit for the spraying.



History of Plum Island:
In 1954 Ft. Terry, a biowar research facility closed its doors on that
scruffy island. It handed over to the new lab, 134 strains of 13 viruses
collected from every Continent of the World.
At that time, the prime directive of Plum Island, was to find an
efficient manner to infect Soviet Livestock.



In 1969, President Nixon OFFICIALLY ended the biowar research program.
Plum Island, officially, became an Animal Foreign Disease diagnostic
facility.



The advent of the 21st Century has the world in fear of bioterrorism.
Bioweapons are cheaply fabricated, easy to carry and undetectable.
Countries unable to fund expensive defense programs are able to put
together an arsenol of bioweapons.



Individual terrorists are able to strike fear into the hearts and
souls of Nations at just the mention of a bioweapon threat.
In 1993, after a 10 year hiatus, Dugway Proving Ground began
bioresearch. In 1983, after a bioaccident which resulted in the anthrax
death of sheep in neighboring pastures, Dugway had ended its biowar
research.

Now, 10 years later, in the name of biowar DEFENSE, Dugway opened
for business without any opposition.
Dugway is testing BIDS (BioIntegrated Defense System). At first the
tests were conducted in liquid with "designer" simulants anthrax, bottulism,
plague and smallpox etal. Now, testing of the defensive weapon is aerosol.

The pathogens are (synthetic, a type of "designer" pathogen) deemed no
more harmful then bacteria found in dirt.
Only time will tell, I guess.



Now, for a PLUM ISLAND UPDATE I now know why Plum Island is a biolevel
5 facility.

In 1970, just one year after President Nixon officially ended
our offensive biowar research, Plum Island was granted 10 million dollars by
the Federal Govt. The purpose of the grant was to research the use of
mycoplasma for use in germ warfare.



The original 10 million dollar grant was for a 5 year period. In 1975,
the funding was continued as the mycoplasma research was deemed very
successful.



In the 1980's a young scientist had just completed his graduate
research at Cornell. He was hired by Plum Island to head up the mycoplasma
research project.



This scientist was Dr. Jawad Al Aubaidi. When it was obvious that
hostilities would break out in the Persian Gulf, he went back home to his
native Iraq, where he headed up the mycoplasma research at the Univ. of
Bagdad.



I have recently received a letter from Dr. Aubaidi's professor at
Cornell, Dr. Carmichael. Dr. Carmichael pointed out that Dr. Aubaidi was a
brilliant young researcher and a very nice person. He also sent me a medline
reference sheet for me to look up Dr. Aubaidi's research prior to and while
at Cornell.

I am still trying to figure out how Dr. Carmichael was able to locate
my mailing address.

I had applied to the National Archives, under FOIA, for information on
Ft. Terry, Plum Island, and information about Dr. Aubaidi and the
circumstances of his untimely death.

I received a letter from the NSA dated June 5, 2000 regarding my FOIA
request. They informed me that the circumstances of the death of Dr. Jawad
Al-Aubaidi, and information on his research is classified in accordance with
Executive Order 12958. My request for information was therefore denied. They
further went on to state that such information would involve breaching
National Security and Foreign Relations.

According to Prof. Garth Nicolson, Dr. Aubaidi was murdered by the
Israelis. Yet, according to Dr. Carmichael, Dr. Aubaidi was hit by a truck
when fixing a flat tire. Dr. Carmichael said that according to Dr. Aubaidi's
wife, the flat tire and subsequent "Accident" was arranged by agents of
Sadom. Were the Iraqis responsible for his death?
According to Cornell Univ. Dr. L. E. Carmichael, Dr. Aubaidi and his
family were planning to move back to the US. At the time of Dr. Aubaidi's
death, Dr. Carmichael states that Dr. Aubaidi's planned move back to the US
was to take place a week after Dr. Aubaidi's accident.

According to Dr. Carmichael Dr. Aubaidi deserves better. I therefore,
am very interested in finding out exactly why Dr. Jawad Al Aubaidi was
murdered in such a manner.



I could never understand how the US and the Pentegon could insist that
biological agents were not used in the Persian Gulf. There was NO MONITORING
FOR BIOLOGICALS in place during the Gulf War. There was only LIMITED
Chemical weapon monitoring.
The BIDS moniitoring technology was not in place at that time. It only
commenced in 1993.



According to accurate and verified accounts, Sodom Hussein purchased
mycoplasma as well as other biologicals, which included West Nile Virus,
from the US right up to 2 weeks before Desert Storm.

I have further discovered that Plum Island had projects in which
"clean" ticks were infected with brucella. They also had a project infecting
ticks with African Swine Fever.
Plum Island Scientists, Dr. Fred Brown and former Plum Island
Director, Alfonso Torres have been working with BSE and other Prion
diseases.



It is my contention that the disease we now call Lyme Disease,
originated in a lab at Plum Island. The funding for research would be
covered in the Mycoplasma grant.



The very first case of Lyme Disease was isolated in a youth, in 1975,
within a few miles of the dock where the Plum Island Government Ferry boat
lands on the Connecticut side of Long Island Sound.



I have heard that a young Connecticut girl who had received yet, not
responded to all known treatments for Lyme Disease, and who was dying, was
sent to the inhouse isolation ward at Plum Island and "emerged" from that
Animal Facility, totally CURED OF LYME DISEASE.



When I first began the investigation into Plum Island and its
connection to the New York outbreak of Kunjin/West Nilelike, I never
imagined that Plum island would be so immersed in biowar projects.
In any event, I now know why it was designated a biolevel 5 facility.


At the time, 1970, it was illegal to work with mycoplasma in the Continental
US. As Plum island was and is a top secret biowar facility, and it is an
island, it was designated biolevel 5 and given the funding to proceed with
mycoplasma research.
So, indeed, Plum Island is a biolevel 5 facility.



August 30,2001 Plum Island Update

The Plum Island upgrade to biolevel 4 has not occurred as of the
writing. There is now a citizen watchdog group overseeing the upgrade and
the activities at Plum Island. It was my hope that the committee would
monitor Plum Island and there would be safeguards in place.



I have recently learned that Plum Island IS doing research on Nipah
virus. Nipah virus, in the paramyxovirus group along with Hendra virus is a
biolevel 4 pathogen. In other words, labs working with this virus mandate a
biolevel 4 designation. This designation is required because Nipah is
zoonotic, jumping species barrier from animal to man, and, has no cure or
preventive vaccine.

So, why is a lab who claims to be only a biolevel 3 and
not a level 5, working on a biolevel 4 pathogen?

Is the fact that they are
an island status and a biolevel 5 a factor in their working on Nipah?



How many other biolevel 4 pathogens are being studied at Plum Island?


Remember, Plum Island is less then 2 miles from Long Island's coast. Birds
and probably bats fly to and from the island. Nipah is a virus that is
vectored by bats. It joins Hendra, another paramyxovirus and Tioman, also
paramyxovirus, as a bat vectored virus.

Although it is in the paramyxovirus family, Nipah and Hendra, and
Tioman are in a separate group.
I wrote to Dr. Daniel Rock who heads the Nipah research unit and, as
of this writing, have not had a response to my mail.
I am wondering where the watch dog group is and why are they not
monitoring the Nipah research. I hope that we can get a response from Plum
Island regarding their Nipah research in a biolevel 3 lab. According to
APHIS/ARS, Plum Island needs funds to upgrade the facility JUST TO MAINTAIN
ITS BIOLEVEL 3 DESIGNATION.

This is the same facility that is working on a
biolevel 4 pathogen?



(I received a while ago, and will provide source as soon as I run across it)





More to follow