Safety concerns at a prominent military germ lab have led the government to shut down research involving dangerous microbes like the Ebola virus.
"Research is currently on hold," the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in Fort Detrick, Md., said in a statement on Friday. The shutdown is likely to last months, Caree Vander Linden, a spokeswoman, said in an interview.
The statement said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to issue a "cease and desist order" last month to halt the research at Fort Detrick because the center did not have "sufficient systems in place to decontaminate wastewater" from its highest-security labs.
[...] The suspended research involves certain toxins, along with germs called select agents, which the government has determined have "the potential to pose a severe threat to public, animal or plant health or to animal or plant products." There are 67 select agents and toxins; examples include the organisms that cause Ebola, smallpox, anthrax and plague, and the poison ricin.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/health/germs-fort-detrick-biohazard.html
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DavePolaschek on Friday August 09 2019, @11:09AM (1 child)
It’s not just us. The Russians may have nuked [reuters.com] some of their own population accidentally. Oopsie.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 09 2019, @04:24PM
No worries, Mate! Russians are white people, so an accident like that falls in line with our globalist agenda.