Jakaleel

The Bush administration in another because we can is moving the USDA labs (run by Homeland Security Department since 2003) at Plum Island to a new facility near you. New sites include Manhattan, Kan; Athens, Ga.; Butner, N.C.; San Antonio, TX; and Flora, Miss. The White House says modern safety rules at labs are sufficient to avoid any outbreak. But Britain’s 2001 outbreak is suspected from a shared government research center.

Plum Island, famous for its name in Silence of the Lambs (Anthrax Island) and Nelson DeMille novel Plum Island is at the extreme northeastern end of Long Island, NY, 100 miles from New York City. It is reachable only from ferry or helicopter and is a restricted area. Being on an island allows keeping herds of animals without risk of infecting area animals. Current research is foot-and-mouth disease, classical swine fever, and vesicular stomatitis virus. The facility is rated BSL-3Ag with labs at BSL-3 and BSL-2. The new facilities would have a 4 rating. So instead of upgrading, the Bush administration wants to build new. By the way current US law restricts foot-and-mouth disease live virus research off the US mainland.

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|TG-21| Jakaleel

Elwenil

I think it's important to note that the CDC already has research centers on the mainland that do research on viruses that are just as bad, if not worse.

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|TG|Elwenil

leejo

Read "The Hot Zone" for a true story that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

_Romulus_

Man, foot and mouth is nothing. Ever hear about the Maryland Ebola outbrake from USAMRIID?

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War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
- John Stuart Mill

GhostintheShell

Note leejo's posting above...you are talking about the same incident.


"In 1989, USAMRIID's expertise was called on by the Virginia Department of Health and Hygiene when a commercial laboratory animal holding facility in Reston, Va., experienced an outbreak of an Ebola virus in its primate population. The potentially devastating outbreak was quickly handled by USAMRIID personnel, preventing what health officials feared could have a terrible effect on humans. A book was written by author Richard Preston (The Hot Zone) on the handling of a potentially dangerous situation. This in turn sparked at least one major movie (Outbreak), which based its story on the basic scenario of the Ebola outbreak, but created a fictional disease and used characters based loosely on USAMRIID Col. Jerry Jaax and his spouse, Col. Nancy Jaax. Otherwise the situations were completely fictional."

Ebola is the "rock star" of the virus world in that it is probably the best known one. There are several much lesser known virii that are equally frightening. I'm at least somewhat sure that eventually one of them will be responsible for resetting the human population back to a level I'm too afraid to make a guess at. This is why I'm not too worried about "over-population".

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Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.
Ernest Hemingway, "On the Blue Water," Esquire, April 1936

War.mongeR1

What's the bid deal? I grew up really close to the Southwest Research Center in San Antonio. They have a bunch of baboons and monkeys in these huge pens that you can see from Loop 410. They've always done all sorts of crazy experiments including playing with scary viruses. It's kind of scary what goes on in there, but it's nothing new, so I'm not too worried.

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"Common sense is not so common." -Voltaire