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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: 2) by DannyB on Friday August 09 2019, @01:32PM (1 child)
Why should the CDC be concerned with the potential of bio contaminants entering wastewater? Especially when our government is in a mode of allowing corporations to contaminate and pollute anything and everything for profit. God bless America[n corporations].
The CDC's fears are misplaced. Until those misplaced fears can be located by a careful search for the misplaced fears, they should not act on the fears that they do not currently have in their possession.
Why is our government concerned about wastewater when it is unconcerned about drinking water in Flint MI?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by dwilson on Friday August 09 2019, @05:31PM
You make a very good point, but you're also drastically over-simplifying the problems so that they can be presented as more-or-less the same. They aren't.
If biowaste consisting of (potentially militarily enhanced) $InfectiousDisease enters the wastewater, there is a non-zero (perhaps even a reasonably high) chance of someone downstream contracting it. Let's say it's me, for the sake of my argument. Perhaps I work in a wastewater treatment plant! I pass it to my neighbor, when I go over to return the table saw I borrowed. He passes it to his kids, who share it with their school. One of the students at that school has an airline stewardess for a mother, who catches it from her daughter and spreads it on her next flight. Those travelers go on destinations or connections at a dozen international airports around the globe. Given that this is a military lab, it's reasonable to assume they're aiming to increase the time delay between infection and first showing symptoms, along with the infectiousness and fatality rate. Congratulations, we've just killed an eighth of humanity!
Contrast to Flint, MI: Corporate greed has lead (pun intended!) to a unacceptably high level of lead in the groundwater, long-time exposure to which has caused various heavy-metal-induced ailments in the population. No one outside Flint, MI is affected; Those passing through and drinking the water for less than a day are none the worse for it.
I hope the difference in those two scenarios is obvious. Both warrant serious concern and looking-in-to from the powers that be, but one is a whole lot more serious than the other.
- D